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Zhe <3ospel anb philosophy 



SIX LECTURES 



PREACHED IN TRINITY CHAPEL 



NEW YORK 



n 



MORGAN DIX, S.T.D., D.C.L. 

RECTOR OF TRINITY CHURCH 







NEW YORK 
E. & J. B. YOUNG & COMPANY 

COOPER UNION, FOURTH AVENUE 






^ <^ 



\0 



tfitf 



Copyright, 1886, by 
E. & J. B. YOUNG & CO. 



TROWS 

r«IMTINQ AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY, 

HEW YORK. 



PREFACE 



The following lectures, with the exception of the 
sixth, were preached in Trinity Chapel, during the 
season of Lent, 1880, and soon afterward printed 
in The Church Eclectic, appearing in the successive 
numbers of that magazine from May to October, 
inclusive. My apology for repeating them is found 
in the urgent requests of friends, particularly among 
the Clergy and Students of theology, that I should 
put them in a form in which they might be more 
easily accessible than when hidden away in the files 
of a monthly publication. Having looked them 
carefully through, revised them, and made some ad- 
ditions, and having finally decided on discarding 
one and substituting another for it, written with 
reference to what seems to me the real ground of 
our differences to-day, I ventured to preach them 
again before giving them to the printer. This is 
their history ; and they are now committed to the 
reader with the hope that they may aid in confirm- 



IV PREFACE, 

ing souls in the faith, and showing to some that are 
in error the light of the truth as we have received 
it from those who, before our day, have most truly 
represented the mind of the Catholic Church. 

There was one point on which I would have said 
much more, had the time permitted ; but since it 
did not, I have added to the six lectures a sermon 
preached before the University of the South, at the 
Annual Commencement of 1885, which the reader is 
requested kindly to take as a note on some state- 
ments in the text which it develops and applies to 
the experience of the Christian believer. 



MORGAN DIX. 



Trinity Rectory, New York, 
Lent, 1886. 



ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. 



LECTURE I. 

CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 
S. Matt. xxii. 41, 42. 



PAGE 

1. Proposal to readjust the Christian Religion to the moral and 

social conditions of the day, . . . . . .3 

The desire is due to — 

a. Dread of free-thinkers, ...... 4 

b. Ignorance of Christian Doctrine, .... 6 

2. Before attempting to readjust Christianity, men must know 

what Christianity is, . . . . . 9 

3.' Natural religion includes — 

a. Knowledge of one's own existence, 

b. Knowledge of God's existence, 

c. Knowledge of one's duty to God, . . . .10 
Christ, reaffirming Natural Religion, declared Himself to be 

the God whom men know in their natural state, . 10, 11 

4. Need of dogma to state the truth about Christ, . . 13 

The dread alternative — 

a. Christ is God, or 

b. He was neither good nor worthy of imitation, . 15 

a. The miracles were true, or 

b. Christ was a dupe or a deceiver, . . . .16 



VI 



ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. 



5. Christianity is Christ's, not ours, 

Men may not readjust what does not belong to them, 



PAGE 

20 

21 



LECTURE II. 

THE DARKNESS OF THE OLD WORLD, AND GOD'S WAY OF 
ENLIGHTENING IT. 



I S. John v. 19, 20. 

1. Need of studying the original adjustment, . 
Two questions proposed — 

What is man? 

What was his condition when Christ came ? 

2. What is man ? 

Body, soul, and spirit, .... 
Related to a supernatural order, 
Needs three things for his development — 
t\ Knowledge of the truth, 

b. Desire of righteousness, 

c. Love of pure and perfect beauty, 

3. What was his condition when Christ came ? 

a. He had lost the knowledge of the truth, 

b. He did not love righteousness, 

c. He was sunk in carnal sin, 
The abuse of the reason the cause of this, . 

4. God, in Christ, set men right — 

a. Not by supplying fresh material for philosophic specu 

lation, ....... 

b. But by revealing objective truth, 
That truth cannot be stated without dogmatic terms, 

5. Need of faitli in God Incarnate, .... 
Office of the private judgment, . 



2% 



28 



29 
30 



31 

32 
32 

33 
33 
35 



36 
38 
39 

40 
4i 



ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. 



Vll 



LECTURE III. 

CHRISTIANITY A DOGMATIC, SACERDOTAL, AND SACRAMENTAL 
SYSTEM. 



Isaiah lxvi. 21, 22. 

Jesus Christ a Fact, a Truth, a Reality, 
He never compromised with rationalism, 
His personal presence brought life and light, 
E??ivia?iuel the sum of the Christian Religion, 

His Presence continues in the Church, 
The Church a Body and a Kingdom, . 

Baptism the door into it, 

Holy Communion continues life in it, 

The System of the Church is — 

a. Dogmatic, 

b. Sacerdotal, .... 

c. Sacramental, .... 
And beyond man's power to change, 

The proof of this is historical, . 
Outline of the evidence, 



48 
49 
5o 
5 1 

52 
53 
55 
56 

59 
60 
61 
61 

62 
63 



LECTURE IV. 

THE ANTI-SACRAMENTAL AND ANTI-DOGMATIC SPIRIT IN 
THE CHURCH IS ESSENTIALLY THE SAME AS THE 
SPIRIT OF PHILOSOPHIC RATIONALISM. 

Isaiah iii. 9. 

1. Proposed sacrifice of Christ and the Church to the spirit of 

the age, ......... 

Christ cannot be readjusted, because God, .... 

The Church cannot be readjusted, because Christ's, 

2. Proposals to revise Christianity come from the outside world, 
They are the result of the working of rationalism, 

It has largely infected religious denominations, . 



69 
70 
71 

71 
72 
73 



Vlll ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. 

PAGK 

3. Signs of correspondence among believers and unbelievers, 

in — 

a. Their dislike of dogmatic teaching, . . 74 

b. Their indifference to truth, . . . . 76 

c. Their repudiation of the sacramental system, . . 78 

4. Effect of the steady war against Church Principles as seen 



m- 



a. Contempt for the Church, 

b. Disuse of the Sacraments, 

c. Neglect of divine worship, 

d. Corrupting of the public moral sense, 

Modern Paganism the reproduction of the old, 

a. Its symptoms the same, . 

b. Its cause the same, 
Compromise with it impossible, . 



80 

81 
82 
84 

87 



89 
90 



LECTURE V. 

THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 

Colossians ii. 8. 

1. Contrast between religion as given to man and religion as 

evolved from man, ....... 95 

a. The rationalist's idea of Christianity, . . 9°~7 

b. The churchman's idea of Christianity, . . . 97 

c. The question must be settled by appeal to history, . 98 

d. And the whole evidence must be admitted, . . 100 

2. Three possible views of Primitive Christianity — 

a. That it had no organized form at all, 

b. That it was originally Episcopal, 

c. Tli at it was originally Presbyterian or Congrega- 

tional, ........ 105 

The first theory considered — 

a. Strong presumption against it, 

b. No scriptural evidence for it, 

c. No later historical evidence for it, . . . IO3-4 



ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. 



IX 



The third theory considered — page 

a. Its supporters adopt a vicious mode of proof, . . 105 

b. Refuted by the consequences if it could be proved, 106-8 
The rationalistic and anti-Episcopal theories falling, the 

Church view stands, ....... 109 

Modern Society cannot be reconciled to the Church, because 
corrupted by the philosophy of rationalism, . . .110 

a. Universal influence of that philosophy, . . .111 

b. Brief statements of its principle, . . . 111-13 
Need of return to Christian science, . . . . .114 
Consequence of failure to do so, . . . . .116 



LECTURE VI. 

THE QUESTION AT ISSUE BETWEEN THE GOSPEL AND 
PHILOSOPHY. 

I Cor. ii. 4, 5. 

Appeal to Christian bodies about us, . . . . . 122 

Their inconsistency, ....... 122 

They help the cause of rationalism, .... 123 

Statement of the question at issue, ..... 124 

a. An objective revealed religion, .... 125 

b. Or a subjective evolved religion, . . . .125 

The Gospel objective throughout, . . . . .126 
Illustrations of Gospel teachings and philosophic perversions 
in — 

a. The doctrine of the Atonement, . . . 128-9 

b. The doctrine of the Church, .... 130-1 

c. The doctrine of the Ministry, ..... 132 

d. The doctrine of the Sacraments, . . . ^ZTrS 
To hold the Gospel system efficiently, we must hold it 

earnestly and exclusively, . . . . . .136 

Reunion among Christians impossible except on the basis of 
dogmatic belief and Church institutions, . . . .138 

The Church of the future must be a Church which teaches 
Christian Truth and Christian Morals . . . 139-41 



X ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. 

UNIVERSITY SERMON. 

THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 

Hebrews x. 19-23. 

PAGE 

Introductory analysis of text, ....... 146 

I. The truths of Revelation — 

1. The attitude of the mind toward them must take the 

form of — 

a. A question, 

b. A conclusion, 

c. A certainty, ....... 147 

2. And accordingly men are — 

a. Sceptics, 

b. Rationalists, 

c. Believers, 147 

3. Illustrations, 147 

II. Assurance the special Gospel gift, ..... 148 
i. Proof from the design of the Gospel, . . . 149-50 
2. St. Thomas' argument against the theory of rational- 
ism, 151-6 

III. The Truth made known by the Gospel is Supernatural, . 156 

1. Natural and Supernatural Orders distinguished, . 157 

2. Truths of the latter cannot be discovered or demon- 

strated by the reason alone, . . . . .157 

3. Men must accept them on trust by faith, . . .158 

4. The reason, however, not limited to a mere assent, . 159 

IV. Our ratiocinations not to be taken for Acts of faith, . .160 

1. Faith not real without submission to authority, 

2. Nor certain, if it rests on our own reasoning powers, 161 

3. Nor permanent, . . . . . . .162 

V. Almighty God the authority to whom man must submit, . 162 
I. Revealed to men — 

a, Iii the natural world, ..... 163 



ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. xi 

PAGE 

b. In the moral consciousness, .... 163 

c. In the Incarnation of the Word, . . . 164 

2. The revelation by the Word continued in the Church, 166 

3. Summary, ........ 167 

VI. Two difficulties considered — 

1. The world's unbelief and resistance to God, . . 168 

2. The plausible charge that our position is essentially 

rationalistic also, . . . . . . .169 

3. Distinction between a right and wrong use of the rea- 

son, 170 

Conclusion, .......... 171 



Cbrist ant) Cbrtetiamtp, 



LECTURE I. 

CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

" Jesus asked them, saying, What think ye of Christ? " — 
S. Matthew xxii. 41, 42. 

Five years ago, during the season of Lent, I gave 
a course of lectures in this Chapel, suggested by a 
proposal to readjust the Christian religion to the 
social and moral conditions of our day. Since that 
time I have been frequently requested to repeat 
them, and put them into permanent form by pub- 
lication. In deference to the judgment of several 
of my reverend brethren, I have decided to do so, 
though not without hesitation, for the subject goes 
so deep, and branches out so widely, that it de- 
serves a better and more thorough handling than I 
have given it ; and indeed, for the treatment of such 
themes, there is great need of a class of men who 
have the time for preparation which is not at the 
command of the overworked rectors of large city 
parishes. How should such a person begin, except 
with apologies for beginning at all ? 

But the question is a burning one ; and one which 
may be answered in many ways ; and one which 



4 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

they ought to answer who believe in the old gospel, 
the creed, and the traditional institutions of Chris- 
tianity, lest a verdict in the case go by default be- 
fore judges who believe in not one of those things. 
Let me begin by stating what was proposed at the 
date to which I referred, and is still, no doubt, in 
the minds of many good men. We know that there 
is a class in the community who consider Christian- 
ity to be the cause of most of the evils which afflict 
the human race, and propose, if they can, to exter- 
minate it. Such is, I think, the position of the 
organization which calls itself the " Association of 
Free Thinkers." Now there are men among us 
whose conviction seems to be, that the only mode 
of successfully resisting that radical assault is, to 
look at Christianity all over, on the theory that 
there is something out of joint in it ; to subject it to 
certain scientific and rationalistic tests ; to shape and 
prune it according to the advice of representatives 
of popular thought, and thus somehow or other to 
square it with the views and demands of the nine- 
teenth century. Their impression seems to be that 
the social philosophers, the psychologists, the scien- 
tific persons, and the free thinkers of our time must 
be right, to some extent, and Christianity, to the 
same extent, in the wrong; and that the only way 
to save Christianity is to revise it and readjust it, 
and that, if this be not speedily done, Christianity 
will go by tlie board. This seems to be the motive 
which inspires the notable design of a readjustment 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 5 

of the Gospel to the social and moral conditions 
of the age. The same idea is probably at the bot- 
tom of other suggestions, as, for example, that old 
truths must take new forms ; that we must drop 
certain terms as obsolete, without, however, giving 
up what they express ; and that we must select or 
coin some new words for the ancient dogmas, in 
hope of making them less repulsive by giving them, 
as it were, a coat of sugar or gelatine. Uneasiness 
and impatience evidently possess the soul of these 
proponents, and a restlessness which argues decline 
of faith, with a horrible dread of being left without 
any faith at all. And the remedy for the trouble is 
to modify the Faith to any extent that may be 
necessary in order to prevent the adversary from ob- 
jecting to it. That point will be reached only when 
the Faith has been reduced to such a minimum that 
the rationalist will not think it worth his while to 
take any further notice of it. 

This, therefore, is the question before us : " The 
Readjustment of Christianity to the Social and 
Moral Conditions of the Time!' The phrase has 
that ring which catches the popular ear, the true 
smack of the philosophical schools ; for what is there 
which the thinkers of this day are not able to tackle, 
and reconstruct, if need be ? Here are that bigness, 
vagueness, and suggestiveness so delightful to the 
intellectual and cultured class, the devotees of "a 
Christ that is to be." Nobody can tell what is meant 
or what shall be forthcoming ; but doubtless we are 



6 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

to have something grand and ponderous out of this 
readjustment. The phrase reeks of the cultured re- 
ligious cant of our age ; it suggests that way of med- 
dling with everything in heaven and earth which is 
becoming a world-wide habit. And yet, let us ad- 
mit at the outset that this idea of readjustment has 
a good sense as well as a bad. There are readjust- 
ments which are not mere tinkerings nor profane 
mutilations; revivals and repairs which ought not 
to be confused with modern inventions and alleged 
improvements. Nay, such readjustments do occur, 
under the guidance of the Holy Ghost. Reflect 
what changes have come over the world since Tibe- 
rius was Emperor in old Rome ! The world has 
changed its face ; it seems no longer the same world. 
The Church has adjusted herself to these variations 
with wisdom and skill. Changes are still in prog- 
ress ; no man can say what is coming next. Perhaps 
readjustment may be desirable. Let us admit that 
it is. We may do so without sacrifice of principle, 
because part of the rebellion against so-called Chris- 
tian doctrine is a revolt, not from Christian doctrine, 
but from inventions of men which have usurped its 
place ; and there are quarters in which readjustment, 
by way of purification, is the crying need of the 
hour. 

Take, for example, the popular outcry against the 
teaching of the Church on the subject of the eternal 
punishment of the wicked. Against what do men 
thus protest ? Not against Catholic Eschatology : 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 7 

they do not even know what that is. But theirs is 
a protest against a narrow scheme which has sup- 
planted a wider doctrine ; a scheme which presents 
to the imagination a heaven and a hell, but no inter- 
mediate state ; extremes, with nothing to connect 
them. That fatal blunder, of cancelling the " Place 
of Departed Spirits," connected with this our world 
by links of love, and prayer, and oblations, and pres- 
ences unseen but felt, the Place where the Dead in 
Christ are gradually perfected for their " final con- 
summation both in body and soul ; " that strange 
notion, that the majority are to be turned at once 
and forever into torment, while the minority, by an 
arbitrary decree, and without regard to merits or de- 
merits, are to be assigned, with equal celerity, to 
seats in heaven ; this rude disturbance of the equi- 
librium maintained in the older Christian teaching 
is what men abjure. But that is not truth ; it is a 
late invention ; it is something diverse from and 
inconsistent with the broad teaching respecting 
Heaven, Hades, and Gehenna which constitutes the 
Catholic exposition of the post-mortem destiny of 
men. 

Again, it is a fact that the worship of Almighty 
God is shamefully neglected. But why not ? The 
office of the preacher has been magnified at the ex- 
pense of that of the priest, until the people have for- 
gotten that the priest's ofifice exists. He who thinks 
that the chief end of going to church is to hear ser- 
mons will go to church just so long as the preacher 



8 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

satisfies him. If he grow wiser than the preacher, 
or if he and the preacher fall out in their views, why 
should he any longer go to church ? The sermon 
was the object ; and the sermon edifies no more. 
Had it been firmly held that the first motive in as- 
sembling ourselves together is to worship Almighty 
God, and had a stately and splendid ritual continued 
to maintain that idea, the religious world might have 
presented a different look to-day; nor would men 
have forgotten that to stand at the altar and offer 
the Memorial before the Eternal Father is a nobler 
function than to preach. 

There is need of readjustment : we frankly admit 
it. But where ? And on what lines ? With that 
as a pretext, one might sweep away very sacred and 
precious things, and replace them with modern and 
unauthorized inventions. That is not what we 
want : it would be disloyalty, spoliation, dishonesty. 
There are standards and molds of religion ; arche- 
types, rules, ever-during patterns in teaching and 
practice, in faith and worship. For these they must 
search who have lost them. The thing to be done 
is not to build a new house. God forbid ! It is to 
repair the old, to reconstruct what passion and folly 
once pulled down; to realize what the prophet fore- 
told : "And they shall build the old wastes, they 
shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall 
repair the waste cities, the desolations of many gener- 
ations." 

Since, then, the problem is, how to put faith into 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 9 

the hearts and religion into the lives of the unhappy- 
people around us, without disloyalty to the princi- 
ples of Christianity, it is clear that we must first 
agree what those principles are. You wish to recon- 
struct Christianity : what is that which you would 
reconstruct ? 

To speak of Christianity is to use a precise term. 
Christianity is that religion in which Jesus Christ 
is centre, substance, and sum ; of which He is Al- 
pha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, the 
First and the Last. The Religion is not ours, it is 
His ; He must be heard ; and whosoever comes for- 
ward to touch, to adjust, to meddle in any way with 
this, must first have the modesty to observe that it 
belongs not, in anywise, to us men. Incessant and 
scrupulously exact reference to the Founder is the 
first duty ; nor has any man a right to leave out, to 
modify, to alter, when dealing with things that 
Christ did, or words that He spake. If you wish to 
keep Christianity, you must keep Christ. What, 
then, did He say ? For not one word of His may 
be altered, dropped out, or explained away, if your 
readjuster is an honest man. 

First, then, Christ reaffirmed an older system 
which He said that He came to fulfil. It is what 
we call Natural Religion : it has these leading 
points as its substance and sum : 

The consciousness of the truth and certainty of 
our own existence, as thinking and intelligent be- 
ings, and living souls : 



10 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

The consciousness of the fact that there must 
have been an intelligent cause of the world, a Su- 
preme Being, the author and giver of life to these 
works by which we are surrounded : 

The conclusion that it is man's duty to fear, love, 
and worship the Great First Cause ; to love Him 
for His goodness, fear Him for the awe which many 
of His acts inspire, and worship Him for the power 
and majesty which invest Him. 

Those are the elements of natural religion : I ex- 
ist, conscious, intelligent, rational ; God exists, for 
I cannot reason out what is before me, nor explain 
myself, except by believing that He is ; and there- 
fore I ought to love, fear, and worship God. 

Christ took these simple truths, these elements, 
to begin with. He said : " I come to fulfil them, to 
clear up doubt concerning them, to add to, expand, 
and develop them." And He began with this as- 
tounding statement ; that He was, Himself, that very- 
God whom man by the light of nature dimly sees. 

There is no escape from that tremendous claim : 
it begins all, it includes all, it ends all ; it IS Chris- 
tianity. Christianity, as a system, is the application 
of the truth that Jesus Christ is " God over all, 
blessed for evermore." By the dim light of nature, 
through a haze not over-clear, men saw that God 
must be. But their ideas about God were con- 
fused ; they multiplied the One God into " gods 
many and lords many ; " ! they made use of signs and 
1 I Cor. viii. 5. 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. II 

symbols, and ended in confounding the sign with 
Him whom it signified ; they thought that " the 
Godhead was like unto gold or silver or stone, graven 
by art and man's device ; " 1 they " changed the glory 
of the uncorruptible God into an image made like 
to corruptible man, and to birds and four-footed 
beasts and creeping things," 2 till all became ob- 
scure. And then the wiser and more cultured, leav- 
ing those follies, sought to find out God by rational 
methods, psychological process, and philosophic 
study : and that failed, and by their scepticism 
they increased the darkness. Dimly men perceived 
that they were immortal ; yet even of this they 
were not sure ; it was rather a hope than a faith. 
And so the world drifted on, encumbered with false 
religions, vain sacrifices, and the paraphernalia of 
elaborate worship of innumerable deities, at which 
the scholars and sophists scoffed, while morals and 
manners reflected the wretched state of the minds 
of men ; and so it went, till a time arrived in the 
counsels of the Most High. Then appeared on the 
earth One born of a woman, and having the form of 
a man, and He said : " I am the Lord your God. I 
am that truth which men are seeking. I am that 
Way wherein the law written on men's hearts tells 
them that they must walk if they would find rest. 
I am that Life which cannot die. Do My will ; 
you shall fulfil the moral law; worship Me; so 
shall you render acceptable service to the Most 
1 Acts xvii. 29. 2 Romans i. 23. 



12 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

High ; fear Me ; that is holy fear ; love Me ; and 
you love the Eternal good. It is I who can lift you 
out of the shadow of death. It is I who bring life 
and immortality to light through My gospel. I am 
the Resurrection and the Life : he that believeth in 
Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live : and 
whosover liveth and believeth in Me shall never 
die." 

This is, in substance, what Jesus Christ said. There 
is no evading the conclusion that He is Christianity, 
and that Christianity is He. We must bear this in 
mind when the talk is of readjustment. If Christi- 
anity be Christ, it may not be Christ who needs re- 
adjustment, but ourselves. 

Now there are those in this age who object to 
nothing so much as to dogma. They say that Christ 
must be preached, indeed, but not as a dogma or 
a doctrine ; that the Christianity which the world 
needs must be neither doctrinal nor dogmatic. I 
do not know what they mean ; the language sounds 
unintelligible. 1 No man can logically retain rever- 

1 €i Religion, to support itself, must rest consciously on its 
Object : the intellectual apprehension of that Object as true 
is an integral element of religion. In other words, religion 
is practically inseparable from theology. The religious Ma- 
hommedan sees in Allah a being to whose absolute decrees 
he must implicitly resign himself ; a theological dogma, then, 
is the basis of the specific Mahommedan form of religion. A 
child reads in the Sermon on the Mount that our Heavenly 
Father takes care of the sparrows, and of the lilies of the 
field, and the child prays to Him accordingly. The truth 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 1 3 

ence or respect for Jesus Christ who does not be- 
lieve that Jesus Christ was what He declared Himself 
to be ; and no one can state, intelligibly, what Jesus 
Christ is, as He described Himself, without the use 
of dogmatic terms. To tell who and what Christ is 
without the terms of dogmatic theology is as im- 
possible as to describe a machine without using the 
terminology of mechanics. Christ is an objective 
fact ; not a sentiment, nor an airy ideal, nor an eva- 
nescent vibration in the thought. To state what the 
fact is, one must speak in language applicable to 
facts. What do they mean who harp thus incessantly 
on the need of getting free from dogma ? Are they 
afraid to ask, or to be asked, the question which the 
Lord put to Peter, " Whom do men say that the 
Son of Man is ? " We have a right to ask it ; we 
must ask it ; and we must have a plain, sharp, clean- 
cut reply. Who is He ? What is He ? Do you shrink 
from such queries ? You cannot mean, surely, that 
it makes no difference who or what He is, the 
founder of that religion in which you say you be- 

upon which the child rests is the dogma of the Divine Provi- 
dence, which encourages trust, and warrants prayer, and lies 
at the root of the child's religion. In short, religion cannot 
exist without some view of its Object, namely, God ; but no 
sooner do you introduce any intellectual aspect whatever of 
God, nay, the bare idea that such a Being exists, than you 
have before you not merely a religion, but at least, in some 
sense, a theology" (Bampton Lecture on The Divinity of Our 
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, H. P. Liddon, D.D., p. 6. 
Rivingtons, 1867). 



14 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

lieve. If it is a matter of consequence, then must 
we have a plain reply ; that reply is, and must be, 
dogmatic ; no other reply would be intelligible. It 
is given, fearlessly and clearly, in the Catholic 
Creed : " God of God, Light of Light, Very God 
of Very God ; Being of One Substance with the 
Father ; yea, moreover, He by whom all things were 
made and by whom all things consist." That is 
dogma ; that is the Christian Faith ; and perhaps 
the secret of the dread of dogma lies in a disbelief 
of that paramount fact. Men dread to make St. 
Peter's confession ; they dread still more to face 
the consequences if they deny it. Let us see what 
the consequences, logically, must be. 

Christ claimed to be the Very God, the Great I 
AM. He wrought miracles in proof of it. His 
apostles believed on Him. The Church was founded 
on the Rock of that truth. From that day to this 
has He been worshipped as God. There is no dif- 
ference on that point among Greeks, Latins, Angli- 
cans ; east and west, north and south, Catholic and 
Protestant, and Christians of innumerable names, 
worship Christ as God. Suppose He were not God 
and that the miracles were not true ; where should 
we be left ? Nothing can be plainer than this : that 
belief in Christ as God has come from simply tak- 
ing what He said of Himself to be true. Suppose 
it was not true, after all, and that no real miracle 
was ever wrought to prove it. What reverence, 
what veneration, could be left for the character of 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 15 

Jesus Christ ? If not the Mighty God, the Miracle- 
Worker, He was not even a wise or a truthful man ; 
nor could we retain respect for His intelligence and 
moral character, unless at the expense of our own 
consistency. For let us reflect ; walking, indeed, in 
deep waters, yet speaking calmly and reverently. 
Either Jesus Christ was, or He was not, God. Sup- 
pose that He was not ; and then read the terms in 
which He spoke of Himself, the claim He made, the 
superhuman powers which He pretended to exercise. 
Measured by His own moral standard, judged by 
His own rule, He loses the character of a model to 
men, and becomes, on the other hand, a specimen 
of a conceit, a pride, and an arrogance which are all 
but incredible. We are taught, in good books, that 
humility and modesty are chief among virtues, that 
he is a fool who overrates himself, that true merit is 
never boastful. Yet here is One who went up and 
down, preaching Himself as the Way, the Truth, 
the Life ; who said that He was One with the Eter- 
nal and Almighty God ; who assumed that Deity's 
incommunicable Name ; who announced Himself as 
the Resurrection and the Life, in whom all the 
dead shall rise again ; who declared that His Flesh 
was the food of immortality; who claimed power to 
forgive sin ; who acted as King in Heaven and Earth ; 
who associated Himself historically with the origin 
of the world and with the scenes that are to attend 
its close ; who taught and trained a band of follow- 
ers to keep up this idea after He was gone, bidding 



1 6 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

them preach Him to all nations, as the God by 
whom all things were created, in whom all consist, 
who must be worshipped with Divine honors, and 
without faith in whom there can be no salvation. 
Was He, then, not God ? If not, what then ? Surely 
a warning, not an example ; the reverse of what is 
honest, good, and worthy of imitation ; this, unless 
you excuse the error by supposing Him to have 
been a half-crazed enthusiast, filled with the wildest 
visions that ever possessed a human mind, and par- 
donable only because He knew not what He said. 
Or let us ask of those miracles of His : Were they 
real, or unreal ? If unreal, what will you say of Him ? 
Either He knew, or He did not know, their charac- 
ter. Did He not know that they were semblances 
and lying wonders ? Then was He Himself imposed 
upon, and therefore ignorant. Did He know that 
they were false ? Then was He a wilful deceiver. 
That is your choice, who deny the Godhead of Christ 
and the truth of His great acts. He was a dupe, or 
a deceiver. If a dupe, He was not wise ; if a de- 
ceiver, He was not good. And yet we still find men 
among us who deny the faith of the Church concern- 
ing Christ, yet flatter themselves that they can still 
reverence and respect Him as a sage, a saint, a pure 
moralist, the flower and pattern of our race. Is that 
the direction which the readjustment of Christianity 
is to take ? Is it to move toward a weakening of the 
dogmatic, a depressing of the miraculous, a depreci- 
ating of the supernatural ? Such readjustment is 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 1 7 

another name for destruction. The Godhead, the 
divinity, the supernatural, the sacramental, are inex- 
tricably blended with everything that Jesus did, and 
said, and was. Try to separate them, and what you 
will have left, that key having been taken away, will 
be execrable, not admirable — a residuum of arrogance, 
ignorance, vaporing, deceit, and folly, which deserved 
the shameful doom of a Roman execution. If Jesus 
Christ, our blessed and glorious Lord and Saviour, 
be not God of God, Light of Light, Very God of 
Very God, then surely the Llebrew that bore that 
name was but a compound of an uneducated dupe 
and an artful impostor, and the religion which is 
called after Him deserves no readjustment other 
than to be completely swept out of a world which it 
has deluded. And I sympathize more with the man 
who honestly comes out and regards Him as an im- 
postor, and the greatest this world ever saw, than 
with the other, no stranger to us, who denies the 
Catholic Faith regarding Jesus Christ, puts his gloss 
on the sacred text, eliminates the marrow and kernel 
of the revelation, disparages dogma, loses himself in 
mist and shadows without substance, makes of 
Christ a mere impersonal sentiment and influence, 
and yet goes on calling himself a Christian and de- 
manding a readjustment of a religion in which, actu- 
ally, he has ceased to believe. 1 

1 " Of a truth, the alternative before us is terrible ; but can 
devout and earnest thought falter for a moment in the agony 
of its suspense ? Surely it cannot. The moral character of 
2 



1 8 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

I know, dear brethren, that these are awful sub- 
jects to deal with ; but it is best to look things in 
the face, and see to what certain tendencies lead. 
I have referred to the restlessness of some Christian 
people under dogmatic teaching. They want noth- 
ing stated in positive and simple terms ; all must be 
loose, vague, and, to plain men, unintelligible. But 
the Christian Religion could not exist without its 
dogma. "Whom do men say that I, the Son of 
Man, am ? " So Christ challenged His hearers ; so 
does He, through the Church, now challenge the 
world ; so does He challenge the intellect of our own 
day. It is a plain question ; there must be a plain 
answer. Who and what and where is Christ ? Let 

Christ, viewed in connection with the preternatural facts of 
His Human Life, will bear the strain which the argument 
puts upon it. It is easier for a good man to believe that, in 
a world where he is encompassed by mysteries, where his 
own being itself is a consummate mystery, the Moral Author 
of the wonders around him should, for great moral purposes, 
have taken to Himself a Created Form, than that the One 
Human Life which realizes the idea of humanity, the One 
Man Who is at once perfect strength and perfect tenderness, 
the One Pattern of our race in Whom its virtues are com- 
bined and from Whom its vices are eliminated, should have 
been guilty, when speaking about Himself, of an arrogance, 
of a self-seeking, and of an insincerity which, if admitted, 
must justly degrade Him far below the moral level of mil- 
lions among His unhonored worshippers. It is easier, in 
short, to believe that God has consummated His works of 
wonder and of mercy by a crowning Self-Revelation in which 
mercy and beauty reach their climax, than to close the moral 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 19 

that go unanswered, and the Religion loses its text, 
its creed, its theme. Answer it, and you have a dog- 
ma, a doctrine, something that children may learn by 
heart, and full-grown men may study to their profit. 
We who sail the stormy seas of this world need our 
chart and our compass, as much as do the mariners 
on the Western Ocean. The lines on the chart 
must be fixed and immovable, the needle must point 
one way. What would you do with a chart, all a 
blur, wherein lines moved and shifted, as each man 
looked at it ? With a compass, wherein the needle 
spun around, in continual oscillation ? If it be so, 
that men are loose in views, misty in faith, inaccu- 
rate in expression, doubtful about Christ, Who, 
What, Where He is, then I submit, that while such 

eye to the brightest spot that meets it in Human History, 
and — since a bare Theism reproduces the main difficulties 
of Christianity without any of its compensations — to see at 
last in man's inexplicable destiny only the justification of 
his despair. Yet the true alternative to this frightful con- 
clusion is in reality a frank acceptance of the doctrine which 
is under consideration in these lectures. For Christianity, 
both as a creed and as a life, depends absolutely upon the 
Personal Character of its Founder. Unless His virtue was 
only apparent, unless His miracles were nothing better than 
a popular delusion, we must admit that His Self-Assertion 
is justified, even in the full measure of its blessed and awful 
import. We must deny the antagonism which is said to 
exist between the doctrine of Christ's Divinity and the His- 
tory of His human manifestation. We must believe and 
confess that the Christ of history is the Christ of the Catho- 
lic Creed" (Dr. Liddon's Bampton Lecture, pp. 307-8). 



20 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

confusion shows the need of some readjustment of 
their religion, the readjustment must take a positive 
form, and that what society needs, in the way of 
plain dogmatic teaching, is not less of it, but more. 

I beg you, dear brethren, weigh these things well. 
We speak of the Religion of Jesus Christ. Observe, 
that there is a confusion in the very term. The ex- 
pression is not merely descriptive, it is also posses- 
sive; this men forget. It does not follow that any 
religion in a which place should be accorded to Jesus 
Christ would have a right to be called His Relig- 
ion. " God is not the author of confusion." I can 
imagine a system called by His name, adorned by 
His symbols, conceding to Him the most conspicu- 
ous position in it, and yet not His Religion at all. 
By Christ's Religion, properly, is not to be under- 
stood any religion in which He is acknowledged 
and kept prominent ; but that particular system 
which He established nineteen hundred years ago, 
and which is His own peculiar possession. This re- 
ligion no man has a right to modify, change, adapt, 
adjust ; whoso touches it touches what is not his. 
Yet men have gone crazy on that point, as about 
many other things. They have acted as if they 
deemed Christ's Religion to be free booty, which 
they were competent to seize on, prune, hack at, en- 
large, diminish at will ; something for each one to 
shape and fit to his own mind ; <ind that all must be 
well, so long as they keep the name of Jesus, and 
continue to describe their works as His. Such lib- 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 21 

erties, and they are those which every sect has taken, 
are intolerable. Let us recall another and a similar 
abuse of individual right. A hymn is the property 
of the poet. He may, or may not, take out a copy- 
right ; but whether he do so or not, the composition 
belongs to the composer, and no one has a right to 
alter it without his consent. Yet think of the busi- 
ness of hymn-tinkering, how shamelessly it has been 
pursued ! Look at our own Hymnal ; you will find 
very many hymns which have been altered, amended, 
improved, according to the private notions of Com- 
mittees of General Conventions ; as though the au- 
thor had no property or right in his own, and every- 
body was free to change them at will. And then 
we hear it said, " Such a hymn is of Wesley, that 
one by Toplady, and this by Montgomery." It is 
not true : the work is Wesley's, touched up by some 
modern poetaster ; Toplady 's, altered by one knows 
not what bold hand. Now the same thing is done, 
habitually, in religion. Not a student, critic, phil- 
osopher, or would-be-reformer but must have a 
hand in the work of revising, correcting, adapting, 
readjusting the Religion of Jesus Christ, under the 
impression that all have the right to take it up af- 
ter that independent fashion, and make it what they 
think it ought to be. Such action in religion is as 
immoral, as inexcusable, as in literature. The copy- 
right will always be respected, by the honest, even 
though the author be dead and gone ; he has rights, 
though without power to assert them. If I revise a 



22 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

book, and change its sense, and greatly alter it, in 
important respects, be it so, provided I state on the 
title-page of this corrupt edition just what I have 
done with the original text ; but to put it forth, 
garbled and transformed, with no hint of the facts, 
and with the name of the author prefixed to it as be- 
fore, is a crime, and one which loses not its character 
though centuries have passed away. Now, that is 
what we have to charge on the founders of schools 
in the Church ; against that we protest in advance, 
when the talk is about readjustment. Let it be re- 
membered that there is an authorship there, a copy- 
right ; that the Founder of that religion lives ; that 
the religion is His ; that it ought to have been 
kept precisely as it came to us from Him, and 
from them who were from the beginning eye-wit- 
nesses and ministers of the Word. What the world 
has seen too much of is revised and improved edi- 
tions ; the Christian Religion, not in its Catholic 
and Apostolic purity, but as edited by Pope and 
Puritan, amended by Luther, corrected by Calvin, 
diluted by Socinus, and now furnished in divers 
editions to suit peculiar tastes ; in the Roman Edi- 
tion, the Anglican Edition, the Baptist and Metho- 
dist and Presbyterian Editions, in the High, Broad, 
Low, Tractarian, Evangelical styles. The sin in all 
this is the same ; men have laid their hands on 
spmething which did not belong to them ; they have 
made free with the properly of another ; the original 
becomes more and more illegible ; the old name re- 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 23 

mains, but it tells what is not true. And probably 
the idea of the latest school is, to do what they did 
with the old parchments, rub off everything, and 
write an entirely new work on the desecrated leaves. 
The noble vellum on which were delivered to us the 
lively oracles of God is to be used as a Palimpsest 
of some modern thing having naught of Christianity 
save the name. 

I stop here for the evening. I give you, as the 
theme of the first of these instructions, two plain 
statements, connected with the proposed readjust- 
ment of Christianity to the social and moral condi- 
tions of our time. First, Christianity is Christ's, 
not ours. Secondly, it comes to us in an intensely 
dogmatic form. It begins with the announcement 
of a fact which confounds the imagination and tran- 
scends the reason. He who does not accept that 
fact, does not accept, and has not got, Christianity, 
in the exact and full sense of the word. He who 
does accept that fact, should expect the sequel to 
correspond to the prelude ; he should expect to find 
other mysteries, other matters too high for him, in 
a system whose Head is the Incarnate God. 



Zbe Darkness of tbe <§>Io Morlo, ano 
0oo's Ma^ of jenliGbtening Ut. 



LECTURE II. 

THE DARKNESS OF THE OLD WORLD, AND 
GOD'S WAY OF ENLIGHTENING IT 

' ' And we know that we are of God ; and the whole world 
lieth in wickedness. And we know that the Son of God is 
come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may 
know Him that is true." — i S. John v. 19, 20. 

I RESUME my theme this evening at the point 
where we broke off a week ago. You recall what 
has been said. In Christianity, as in other systems, 
readjustment is sometimes needed, and has, at in- 
tervals, been made. But since the Christian Re- 
ligion is not the invention of man, but the ordinance 
of God, to readjust it is a dangerous work. It has 
not changed ; it came to us complete in essentials ; 
it has been damaged and defaced by men ; but, in 
itself, the Religion is the same. What needs to be 
done from time to time is to clear it of earthly sedi- 
ment and accretions. The world was in evil case 
when Christ came into it. He took it in hand ; He 
applied such remedies as He knew to be best. If 
the moral and intellectual conditions which then 
existed be reproduced, should not the remedies be 
the same ? It may appear, on investigation, that it 



28 THE DARKNESS OF THE OLD WORLD, 

is a backsliding society which needs readjustment, 
and not that holy religion which it has rejected, 
oblivious of the lessons of the past. 

The word which I have used so frequently con- 
veys a clear idea : it implies that something is going 
wrong and must be set right again. Mathematical 
instruments need adjustment from time to time, 
and astronomical instruments, and sextants, and 
watches, and anything that has fine and complicated 
machinery : it is necessary to adjust, whenever 
things fall out of gear. But where in God's created 
universe is there a work more wonderful than Man ? 
What machine so curious and complicated as his 
body, what so subtle and mysterious as his soul ? 
What must the Religion be through which this 
marvellous being is linked to his Divine Creator, 
which has its correspondences in his entire life, 
which lifts him up and governs him forever ? Must 
not that also be a delicate, a wonderful, thing ? 
Were it strange, considering the agency and the sub- 
ject, if disturbance should sometimes occur ? In 
that event, what will be the wise man's course ? 
Surely, to study the original adjustment. And the 
lines of that study are two ; they lead us to these 
two questions : What was Man, as God made him ? 
and What was his intellectual and moral condition, 
when (rod came here to seek and to save 1 lis lost ? 

I ask these two questions, and I call on you to 
ponder the answer. 

What is Man '•! I low did Christ's Religion meet 






AND GOD'S WAY OF ENLIGHTENING IT. 29 

him ? How did it work along the lines of his char- 
acter ? How did it touch him in his daily life ? 
That is our first inquiry. You have before you 
this problem, to revive the power of a system which 
regenerated the old world. Remember : man, so far 
as that system has to do w T ith him, remains the 
same. He is, to-day, essentially, what he was when 
Christ appeared in Syria : there are the same ele- 
ments, the same functions, the same wants, in this 
our nature; nor can a new system be needed, 
where, in the meantime, no essential change has oc- 
curred. What, then, are the leading characteristics 
of Human Nature ? I do not ask, what were they, 
but, what are they : for men, take them where and 
when you choose, are substantially the same, from 
one generation to another. 

It has been well said, that " in Human Nature, it 
is the balance, harmony, and coequal development of 
Sense, Intellect, and Spirit which constitutes per- 
fection." 1 " Body, Soul, and Spirit," saith the 
Apostle, summing up what we are. 2 And in man, 
we find, over and above the physical senses, three 
more : the intellectual sense, the moral sense, and 
the aesthetic sense. Man has an intelligent sense of 
the true, a moral sense of the good, an aesthetic 
sense of the beautiful. His are the reason, the 
affections, and the imagination ; he sympathizes, he 
thinks, he loves. Each element in him desires its 

1 Lord Lindsay : Christian Art, vol. ii., p. 163. 

2 1 Thess. v. 23. 



30 THE DARKNESS OF THE OLD WORLD, 

own, and abhors what is alien : thought and reason 
cannot endure the irrational, the impossible, the ab- 
surd ; the heart, if pure, abhors the evil and the cor- 
rupt ; the cultured taste revolts at the squalid, the 
sordid, and the ugly. And true progress depends 
on the just and even development of the entire na- 
ture : cultivate one part, neglecting the rest, and the 
product is a monster. Stunt the intellectual pow- 
ers, and you have a fool ; dwarf the moral powers, 
and you have a devil ; starve the affections, and the 
life is hard, cynical, and cold ; kill the imagination, 
and all things become stiff, dry, and gloomy. De- 
velop, evenly and faithfully, the full manhood, and 
you find your reward in the sweetness and strength 
of a thoughtful, pure, and beautiful life. 

But how shall this complex nature be developed ? 
Progress must be toward some anticipated end ; ad- 
vance is made by the help of lights and marks along 
the way and far in front. You come at once to the 
questions, not to be evaded, Whither are we going, 
and for what do we exist ? Is this world all ? or is 
there another ? Is the life of man complete in 
three score years and ten, or is there more of it to 
come ? Is this natural order the only one with 
which we have to do, or is there also a supernatural 
order ? Your answer to these questions is decisive 
of your fate. For if this world be all, and we have 
no other life, then the goal of human development 
and its limits must be sought somewhere this side 
of the barrier of death. But if not ; if there be also 



AND GOD'S WAY OF ENLIGHTENING IT. 3 1 

a supernatural order, with which our relations are 
direct ; if man has an immortal soul ; if God " hath 
given him length of days forever and ever," 1 then 
the outlook for us is away beyond the black furrow 
of the grave. Development stops not here; it goes 
on, through things temporal into things eternal ; and 
the final objects of life, the ideals, the motive powers, 
must be in that radiant front. The intellect seeks 
an absolute truth, where alone it should be sought, 
in God. The moral nature cries out for a perfect 
righteousness. The aesthetic nature discerns the 
outlines of an ideal loveliness feebly realized in na- 
ture. Development, in any creature capable of it, 
is the working toward the highest point which, 
by the constitution of that creature, it is able to 
reach. If man be not body only, but body, soul, 
and spirit, made " in the Image of God," 2 the limits 
of development for him can only be attained in per- 
fect union with that God " who is a spirit," 3 and in 
that state where they " never die." 4 For us, the 
" Reason Why" is in the life beyond the tomb; the 
beacons are on the coast of the eternal land. And 
now, that there may be growth, healthful and steady, 
intellectual, moral, and aesthetic advance, three 
things must be made known to us : an absolute truth, 
a faultless righteousness, and a perfect beauty. The 
intellect demands the knowledge of a Truth, in 
which to rest, and by which to measure all lower 

1 Psalm xxi 4. 2 Genesis i. 27. 

3 S. John iv. 24. 4 S. John xi. 26. 



32 THE DARKNESS OF THE OLD WORLD, 

and minor truths; the affections demand union 
with a Love which may fill the heart and hallow all 
lesser loves ; the imagination seeks the sight of a 
supreme ideal beauty, which shall throw its bright 
beams on this inferior state, 

" Leaving that beautiful which still was so, 
And making that which is not, till the place 
Becomes religion, . . . " 

and killing the taste for what is vulgar, foul, and 
impure. Nor can it ever be well with men, unless 
they know the truth, and love righteousness, and 
see that nothing is beautiful which is not also holy 
and pure. 

I have answered the first question — What is Man 
as God the Creator meant Him to be ? 1 come to 
the second — What was Man as God the Redeemer 
found him when He came to seek and to save His 
lost? 

Briefly, the earth was a scene of intellectual, 
moral, and religious chaos. Truth, righteousness, 
beauty ; what had become of them ? Men were 
certain of nothing ; convictions were lost ; opinion 
and surmise alone remained ; they saw, distinctly, 
nothing beyond the range of sense and the line of 
this present life. The intellect, lost in speculation, 
could not find a truth in which to rest. The con- 
science was but "a foolish heart darkened. " ! The 
ideal of beauty was found in the brawn and thews 

1 Romans L 21. 



AND GOD'S WAY OF ENLIGHTENING IT. 33 

of an athlete or the lissome graces of a naked courte- 
san. It is an old story, that of the degradation of 
mankind, in the age which closed in that blessed 
night when the Angels came out above the plains of 
Bethlehem and sung their Christmas carol of grace, 
mercy, and peace ; yes, it is an old and a horrible 
story. What was religion ? A worship of devils, 
not of God ; a vast network of polytheism ; the dei- 
fication of vices, the canonization of animal lust and 
unregulated passion. Think of that pagan Curia, 
in which the gods and goddesses were thieves, rob- 
bers, adulterers, and adulteresses ; their abandoned 
lives the reflex of the sins of the lower world ; their 
hearts full of intrigue, envy, malice ; hateful, and 
hating one another. There are Juno, the jealous 
wife, and Venus, the voluptuous ; Vulcan, the de- 
formed blacksmith, and Mars, the model of a dare- 
devil soldier of fortune ; and one knows not what 
troop of dissipated, depraved, disgusting wretches, 
called by God's name, and worshipped at their 
several shrines ; so bad in general that to be chaste 
and pure was, in that horde, a marked distinction. 
What wonder if the most characteristic of the pagan 
rites were hidden from the public eye ? And such 
being the religion, what were the morals of that age, 
and what its social condition ? They were what 
such a religion might be expected to produce; what 
St. Paul describes, in his epistles, what the Christian 
Fathers have painted, with hands which cautiously 
drew aside the veil and scarce dared to trace the 
3 



34 THE DARKNESS OF THE OLD WORLD, 

scene thus disclosed. It is the reign of the strong 
over the weak ; oppression and violence are in their 
borders ; lust, outdoing itself, passes the barrier of 
nature, and takes monstrous shapes. Man, de- 
graded and brutalized, a law unto himself, exercises 
a wide and general tyranny ; what we call women, 
are slaves ; what we call slaves, are chattels and not 
human beings; even the child is sold by its own 
parent. And whence comes this total overthrow of 
religious and moral restraints ? We trace it to one 
cause: the trouble begins in the mind and spirit; 
it travels thence through the members ; it blights 
the household ; it poisons the whole state. If Man 
be not intellect, he is nothing ; the intellect is his 
God-given instrument to keep him straight, true to 
God, true to himself. Do you ask what the mind 
was at in those days ? Chaos is everywhere, indeed ; 
yet nowhere more hopeless than in the thoughts of 
men. All are at sea ; there is no creed ; no unity 
in belief; no real belief at all. There arc philoso- 
phies, theories, guess-work ; inquirers, single and in 
groups; and, everywhere, negation. One man says 
that there is no God at all; another decides that 
there are many ; a third declares his conviction that 
matter is all, and that there is neither angel nor 
spirit ; there are a dozen explanations of the origin 
of things ; speculation runs wild on every topic that 
curiosity suggests. As for the soul, no settled be- 
lief in its immortality; no convincing argument; a 
probability, at best, confessed by some few minds. 



AND GOD'S WAY OF ENLIGHTENING IT. 35 

Is not this mad confusion of thought the source of 
confusion elsewhere ? If every function is disorgan- 
ized, is it not because the Reason no longer acts its 
part ? To discover the source of the abominations 
of paganism in its social, moral, and religious aspects, 
walk by the side of the troubled river up to its 
fountain. Intellectual error is the well-head of the 
trouble; the finite mind, no longer guided by the 
Infinite Mind, is independent and free ; it sees, if 
anything, mere phantoms of its own creation ; it 
works eccentrically, or madly, like an engine over 
which one has lost control ; nor is there any depart- 
ment of society in which the shock is not felt. 

Such was the state of affairs when God drew near, 
to help and save ; moral and intellectual chaos. Its 
cause, the absence of certainty on points on which 
man must have light; the want of an authority to 
enforce obedience, and a grace to enable to obey. 
Its effect, that dismal scene on which a pure mind 
can hardly dwell without danger of contamination. 
To this are they come "who did not like to retain 
God in their thoughts ; here be darkness as the 
shadow of death, and dimness of anguish, and a 
moral stench like that of a pest-house, 

11 ' . . . l'occhio intorno invio, 

E veggio ad ogni man grandc compagna 
Piena di duolo c di tormento 00/ " l 

And next I ask you to observe a memorable thing. 
Here was a problem: to set the world right, to 
1 Inferno, canto ix., 109-111. 



36 THE DARKNESS OF THE OLD WORLD, 

bring life and light to men, to give the mind a truth 
on which to feed, the heart a love in which to rest, 
the soul a perfect beauty to compensate for the mis- 
ery of evil and sin. Now, if ever, shall we learn the 
best means to that end ; and what was true of one 
time is true of all. God had that problem to solve. 
What did God do ? What remedy did He apply ? 
Did He proceed by setting afloat in the world a 
fresh instalment of opinions ? Did He try to cure 
the widespread evil by furnishing a fresh supply of 
material for the wrangling schools ? Was it a fine 
philosophical statement, or a rare theoiy, or a higher 
range of speculation that they needed, those men 
who were sitting in darkness and in the shadow of 
death ? The Saviour of the human race — granting 
that there was such a personage, and it has been be- 
lieved, these two thousand years, almost, that there 
was — the Saviour of mankind, how did He come ? 
Did He come as a Doctor or Professor, to found 
another and very superior Academy, where men 
should go on arguing about lofty themes ; in which 
free inquiry should be promoted, and experimental 
science stimulated; from which, as from a prolific 
mother, hundreds of schools should grow and mul- 
tiply from age to age, each expressive of the passing 
thoughts and changing views of men ? Fear not, 
tremble not, lest an expedient so vain, an essay so 
important, should be the lame result of the Act 
of Redemption. A man would have taken that 
method ; it is precisely what would have been 



AND GOD'S WA Y OF ENLIGHTENING IT. 37 

deemed the proper thing by one of our restless and 
inquisitive speculators, our supercilious and self-suf- 
ficient students and essayists. That is what a man 
would have done ; it was not what God did. God's 
thoughts are not our thoughts ; His ways are not 
our ways. To a world crazed with speculation, 
drunken with its own imaginations, God gave what 
it needed most. " The truth," said He, " shall set 
you free ; and I am the truth." Into that lunatic 
asylum, where men, wearing the hollow masks of 
dreamland, walked about exchanging their fancies, 
private judgments, and philosophic speculations, 
God sent a Fact, an objective Reality ; something 
independent of human thought, not made by it, 
nor in it, nor of it ; not evolved out of it, not to 
be affected, modified, adjusted by it. That Fact 
was not a proposition, nor a phrase, nor a figure of 
speech, nor a poetical sentiment ; it was not some- 
thing which men could read backward or forward, 
make or unmake, lessen or expand. But that Fact, 
briefly, was God Himself; God, Who is in substance 
distinct from all created things ; God, Whose ex- 
istence is objective, and not an outcome of human 
thought ; the Beginning and the End, the First and 
the Last — that God in Whom is "no variableness, 
neither shadow of turning." * That God was born 
of the Virgin, " made of a woman, made under the 
Law ; " 2 He Who is before all things, became, in 
time, a Fact in history ; He appeared among us, " in 
1 S. James i. 17. 3 Gal. iv. 4. 



38 THE DARKNESS OF THE OLD WORLD, 

substance of our flesh ; " ' He came to men as their 
Brother, calling them to Himself as " the Way, the 
Truth, the Life." 2 Here is a Fact that cannot be 
changed; that admits neither of adjustment nor re- 
adjustment ; that needs no new terms in which to 
state it, because it remains perpetually the same. 
They testified of Him as One Whom they had 
heard, Whom they had seen, Whom their hands had 
handled. 3 The terms in which He is described in 
the Scriptures > in the Creed, and in the liturgical 
and devotional offices of the Church can never need 
amending or correcting. New-fangled phrases could 
but obscure " the truth as it is in Jesus Christ." 
There is no more need of new terms in which to 
state that old truth than of new names for the head, 
the hands, the heart, in your own material frame. 

I say it earnestly and solemnly, that this is above 
all others the thing most necessary for us to know, 
and knowing, to hold fast. God's remedy for the 
wild misery of a world lost in error, and going deeper 
into darkness, was the distinct revelation to it of 
what we call objective truth ; of a truth which IS, 
apart from those to whom it is shown ; which exists 
outside of the mind that seeks it and the heart that 
loves it ; which stands unchanging while men pass 
away ; which is as little affected by their judgments 
concerning it as the great seaward cliff by the light 
spray or the lighter vapors that strike its front. To 

1 Collect for Feast of the Purification. 
2 S. John xiv. 6. 3 I John i. I. 



AND GOD'S WA Y OF ENLIGHTENING IT. 39 

state that truth we must use dogmatic language ; 
the dogma is not the truth itself, it is our way of 
telling what the truth is, that we may hold it intel- 
ligently ourselves and teach it to other men. 1 And to 
that objective truth, brought to our eyes, presented 
to our grasp, in some plain and practical way, with- 
out evasion, or donble-entendre ; to that truth, ex- 
pressed in some clear, honest statement which the 
simple and the very children can apprehend, must 
man surrender ; he must accept it, he most love it, 
he must live in it and by it ; and so the truth shall 

1 We are all indebted to the Rev. Marvin R. Vincent, 
D.D., for some strong, manly, sensible words on the subject 
of Dogma, very much needed in these days of religious 
timourousness and imbecility. (t Christ was a dogmatic 
teacher. I know that the word ' dogma ■ jars upon some 
ears, but it is a fair question whether the word or the ear is 
responsible for the jar. . . . Dogma is a good New Tes- 
tament word, which always carries the sense of authority. 
The purest dogmatism is the basis of at least two-thirds of 
our knowledge." And again, "We cannot work for men's 
salvation with anything less than a certainty, held by us as 
it was held and propounded by Christ as a fixed and unalter- 
able, eternal fact. Men cannot be moved to self-abandon- 
ment and self-consecration by an open question. If the 
Gospel is something yet to be proven, it is time that Chris- 
tians, at least, abandoned it for something else. If the Gos- 
pel is still a thing in doubt, if there is a possibility that 
science may yet put us out in the cold, without a Saviour, 
and bankrupt in faith, and shivering in the blasts from every 
point of the philosophic compass, I, for one, want no more 
of it." ("Christ as a Teacher." A. D. F. Randolph & Co. 
New York.) 



40 THE DARKNESS OF THE OLD WORLD, 

make him free ; ' free from the law of sin and death, 
free from the torture of doubt, free, above all, from 
himself, his blunders and vainglorious boasts ; that 
truth, in short, shall save him. And that is God in 
" Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and to-day and 
forever." 2 

This is the meaning of the Incarnation in its rela- 
tion to human thought. It brings us personally in 
contact with the supernatural world. It sets before 
us the eternal standards of Truth, Love, and Beauty. 
It restores to man the object which he seeks. It is 
the one firm thing, where all else is loose and un- 
steady, the one thing that we cannot touch save as 
we touch what we also adore. And the man who 
looks out of himself, and beholds that sublime fact, 
and thows himself with ardor into religious devotion 
to it, shall find his reward : the way is clear before 
him. God Incarnate is the goal of intellectual ef- 
fort, the perfection of human development. In God 
Incarnate is the law of true holiness and righteous- 
ness ; in Him is perfect beauty ; and in the desire 
of union with Him is the motive which men need to 
break with the evil and ugliness around them and 
ascend to a higher plane. Mind, heart, imagination 
may drink of that eternal fountain and be satisfied ; 
" all our fresh springs are in Him ; " s there is the 
response to every question, the object on which to 
direct the energies without dread of failure ; there 

1 S. John viii. 32. 2 Hebrews xiii. 8. 

3 Psalm lxxxvii. 7. 



AND GOD'S WA Y OF ENLIGHTENING IT. \\ 

are power and strength, glory and joy. Such is the 
prize within the reach of him who comprehends 
that his duty is to use his natural powers to grasp 
and appropriate what God shows him outside of 
himself. Faith in God, revealing Himself to man, 
is but motion away from ourselves and toward 
Him ; to walk by faith is the fulfilment of our des- 
tiny and the crowning victory by which we over- 
come the world. 1 

Before concluding, I wish to refer, briefly, to a 
point connected with my subject. The curse of 
man, from the beginning, has been his own opinion, 
followed in known variance with the command of 
God. Has, then, the private judgment nothing to 
do ? Are we not to depend on it for anything ? 
Far from us be the thought. The private judgment 
has a worthy and proper office : it is a verifying fac- 
ulty. Let me try to make this clear. When Christ 
appeared on earth, there were things in Him which 
men had neither the right to discuss nor the power 
to settle. His Eternal Generation, the union of the 
Godhead and the Manhood in His Person, the mys- 
tery of His perfect wisdom, the way in which vir- 
tue was stored up in His Human Flesh, the modus 
operandi of the sacraments which He instituted : 
think as they might on these and like points, their 
thoughts amounted to nothing; they made, they 
unmade, nothing ; and therefore thought was folly. 

1 ' s And this is the victory that overcometh the world, even 
our faith " (i John v. 4). 



42 THE DARKNESS OF THE OLD WORLD, 

But men had a right to verify His miracles, to com- 
pare what He said of Himself with what was writ- 
ten in their sacred books ; to study the effect of His 
teaching ; to satisfy themselves that He did really 
die on the cross ; above all, to convince themselves 
of the fact that He did truly rise again from death. 
Such rights, as a verifying faculty, has the private 
judgment. But beyond that it may not safely go. 
It cannot discover supernatural truth ; it cannot 
demonstrate such truth ; of such truth it is not a 
competent judge. It can verify the evidence of the 
revelation of divine mysteries ; but the mysteries 
themselves are far above beyond its reach ; it can- 
not fathom, or modify, or adjust, or readjust what 
is simply presented to it for acceptance by the Holy 
Ghost. 1 

We may properly inquire, Were the miracles act- 
ually wrought ? Did Christ claim to be God ? On 
the whole, has that claim been sustained by the re- 
sults ? Did He truly rise from the dead ? Did He 
found a visible Church ? Are the Gospels genuine? 
Is the history of that organization known as the Holy 
Catholic Church authentic ? Did Ignatius of An- 
tioch accept Episcopacy ? Did Irenaeus and Clem- 
ent of Jerusalem hold the Real Presence ? Do the 
ancient liturgies contain the idea of a Sacrifice in 
the Eucharist ? Such questions are legitimate ; the 

1 For the development and application of this point the 
reader is referred to the University Sermon which constitutes 
the Appendix to this series of lectures. 



AND GOD'S WA Y OF ENLIGHTENING IT. 43 

judgment of man, aided by study, may reverently 
consider them. But if it leave that work and set 
up to dispute and argue about the Mystery itself ; if 
it return to the old business of approving or disap- 
proving the substance of the revelation, saying of 
this, It is incredible ; and of that, It is immoral ; and 
of something else, It agrees not with general expe- 
rience, and is therefore false ; or, It shocks me, and 
I will not hear it ; or, It is foolish superstition, fit 
only for women and children : in that case the pri- 
vate judgment has simply run mad once more ; it 
has resumed that wretched occupation which made 
the old world the dark place which it was ; it con- 
tradicts itself; it commits suicide. And whenever 
you hear of readjustments of the Religion of Jesus 
Christ, if it implies that man is able to sit as judge 
on what God tells him, and that the Creed of the 
Catholic Church is to be subjected to tests invented 
by the finite intelligence, and to stand or fall by that 
rule, say at once, " We will have no part or lot in 
such proceedings. We know how God helped men 
of old ; there is no better way to help us now ; He 
helps us in that same way still. And whenever the 
human reason, assuming the double office of critic 
and judge, attempts to improve upon God's work, 
it does but renew the blunder of the past, and 
courts the confusion which must ensue." 

Here let me conclude. Consider how simple was 
God's mode of redeeming the world ; to introduce 
into the confusion, perplexity, and doubt which were 



44 THE DARKNESS OF THE OLD WORLD. 

the outcome of unguided human thought a Saviour 
Who was truth, fact, and reality; Who "abideth 
ever," the same, whatever we may think about 
Him ; in whom all questions find their answer, and 
all cares are stilled. To Him let us repair, when 
weary of dispute and debate ; to Him let us bear 
our testimony as honest men. " LORD, TO WHOM 
SHALL WE GO BUT TO THEE ? THOU HAST THE 
WORDS OF ETERNAL LIFE." 






Gbdatianitp a Dogmatic, Sacerootal, 
ant) Sacramental System* 



LECTURE III. 

CHRISTIANITY A DOGMATIC, SACERDOTAL, 
AND SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM. 

" And I will also take of them for priests and for Levites, 
saith the Lord. For as the new heavens and the new earth, 
which I will make, shall remain before Me, saith the Lord, 
so shall your seed and your name remain." — Isaiah lxvi. 

21, 22. 

My theme to-night is this : Christianity is a dog- 
matic, sacerdotal, and sacramental system. Let me 
review what has been said thus far. We hear a de- 
mand for the readjustment of the Christian Religion 
to the conditions of modern society. We ask, first, 
what that religion is ? We find it to be, substan- 
tially, Jesus Christ, the Eternal Word, Incarnate. 
We ask, next, why He thus entered this world ? 
The answer to that question is found in the picture 
presented by the world when He came. The scene 
was one of intellectual, moral, and religious con- 
fusion ; that confusion the outcome of unregulated 
thought. Men did not like to retain God in their 
thoughts ; and God had suffered them to walk in 
their own ways, 1 and chaos was the result. The 

1 Acts xiv. 16. 



48 CHRISTIANITY A DOGMATIC, 

earth was a scene of disorder and riot. Polytheism, 
skepticism, atheism, polygamy, and slavery ; crime, 
mentionable and unmentionable; oppression, injus- 
tice, and misery ; the reign of the strong over the 
weak, of might over right ; superstitions, devil-wor- 
ship, obscenity ; these meet the eye as one opens 
the records of the past. But these things are the 
fruit of unchecked human passion ; and human pas- 
sion is unchecked when the active intellect revolts 
from God and becomes a law to itself. To save a 
world thus lost, the Christian Religion was set up 
among us. What was that Religion ? A gospel of 
truth proclaimed to a world lying in wickedness 
through ignorance of the truth. Fact is the oppo- 
site of opinion ; fact is the cure for fancy. And 
Jesus Christ came into the world, a Fact, to help 
men stifled in a drench of opinions ; a Truth to dis- 
sipate mere shadows of truth ; a Reality to put an 
end to the unreality of a vain show. That is our 
statement of the case. God's remedy for the mis- 
chief wrought by self-sufficient private judgment 
was the exhibition of objective truth, which man 
can neither discover, nor modify, nor change. " The 
Word zvas made Flesh, and dwelt among us ; and 
we beheld His Glory, the Glory as of the Only Be- 
gotten of the Father, full of grace and truth? ' The 
Presence of God among men — not by way of repre- 
sentative, nor by sign, symbol, or letter, but in 
Person — this was the divine remedy for the " mad- 
1 S. John i. 14. 



SA CERDOTAL, AND SA CRAMENTAL SYSTEM. 49 

ness of the people." ' The Word Incarnate was in- 
tense Reality; a Reality independent of our thought. 
He entered, majestically, into the crowd of talkers, 
speculators, theorists, and inquirers ; into the horde 
of sorcerers and pagan priests, adulterers, false 
swearers, and oppressors ; He told them what and 
who He was ; He demanded their prompt, unre- 
served, and unconditional submission. It is no 
question of opinions, but a matter of fact ; no hag- 
gling with subtle dialecticians, but a challenge to 
them to leave off their profitless and interminable 
discussions, and repent, believe, and save their souls. 
It is not another philosopher, one moralist the more, 
to set up his petty school, and weave new webs of 
speculation ; but it is the King coming to send 
among these mobs the two-edged sword of Truth, 
" piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and 
spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and discerning 
the thoughts and intents of the heart." 2 Such was 
the Religion as it first appeared, as first proclaimed 
by the Apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ. Who 
ever heard from Him, or them, an uncertain sound, 
a syllable of compromise with the rationalistic 
schools of the day ? The message is stern and 
straightforward. " I, Christ, must take, in thee, the 
place of everything else. Let not the wise man 
glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man 
glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in 
his riches ; but let him that glorieth glory in this, 
1 Psalms lxv. 7, 2 Heb. iv. 12. 

4 



50 CHRISTIANITY A DOGMATIC, 

that he understandeth and knoweth Me, that I AM, 
Jehovah the Eternal. Go ye, My Apostles, into all 
the world ; preach this to every creature : he that 
believeth and is baptized shall be saved ; but he that 
believeth not shall be damned. The world has had 
enough of its private judgments ; they are nauseat- 
ing ; let the reign of fact and truth begin." ' Thus 
commissioned the Twelve went forth and taught ; 
and what they taught was positive and dogmatic ; 
and the upgrowth was, not new schools, fresh work- 
shops of opinion, more theories to flourish for a 
while, and die ; but a Kingdom" made up of men 
knit each to each, by loyal and all-daring devotion 
to One Lord Jesus Christ. 

Such in its origin was that religion which we call 
by the Name of Christ. How was it to be propa- 
gated ? How kept up until the end of the world ? 
It is, substantially, the coming of God to His own : 
" the mystery of godliness is God manifest in the 
Flesh." 2 But what ? Shall the presence be with- 
drawn ? How could that be ? We see not how. 
It looks to us as if, in that case, all must relapse 
into confusion. The Lord whom we worship and 
love is all powerful ; He is not limited to one way; 
by any one of a hundred means He might have se- 
cured the permanence of the work which he began. 
But it seems to us that somehow or other He must 
stay among us; that His presence must be an en- 

1 Jer. ix. 23, 24 ; S. Matthew xxviii. 19; S. Mark xvi. 16. 

• 1 Tun. in. 16. 






SA CERDOTAL, AND SA CRAMENTAL SYSTEM. 5 I 

during presence. On this point, however, we are 
thrown simply on the study of history. It is not a 
question of opinion ; it is one of fact ; a question to 
be settled not by what you or I or another may 
think, but by witnesses competent to testify ; by 
records, if they can be found ; by monuments pre- 
serving the story of the past ; by testimony sufficient 
to prove what we wish to know. By study of such 
authorities without prepossession and without prej- 
udice, we come to this : that as Christianity con- 
sisted, originally, in the manifestation of God in the 
Flesh, so Christianity continues to be a manifesta- 
tion of God Incarnate, an abiding Presence of 
Christ with us in some real way, independent of our 
thoughts about the matter; a Presence made by His 
power, and realized to us by our faith. 

The word " Emmanuel" expresses this condition 
of things. God with us, is the sum of the Christian 
religion. That is a proper description of the re- 
ligion from the beginning to the end. Emmanuel : 
the meaning of the word was not exhausted in those 
blessed years, three and thirty in all, during which 
Christ was seen in Judaea and known as the prophet 
of Nazareth. It is as accurate, as necessary to-day ; 
it shall be true till all be fulfilled, till the earth and 
the heavens shall pass away and the new earth shall 
appear. 1 How can he help seeing this who will ac- 
cept the evidence of those who from the beginning 
were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word, and 
1 Rev. xxi. i. 



52 CHRISTIANITY A DOGMATIC, 

of those who followed them ? Summon as witnesses 
the children of the kingdom, the members of the 
household ; apostle and evangelist, doctor and pas- 
tor, saint and martyr ; Clement, Ignatius, Augustine, 
Jerome, Gregory, Chrysostom, Irenaeus, Cyprian, 
Cyril, Basil, Ambrose, and the rest, so great a cloud 
of witnesses ; study the religion in its documents, 
its records, traditions, liturgies ; and this comes forth, 
one constant belief, one perpetual assertion, that as 
the fact of God's visible presence among us consti- 
tuted the beginning of the Gospel, so the fact of 
His continuous though invisible presence among 
us is the constitutive truth of the Gospel age after 
age ; that the restoration of the visible presence shall 
be granted at the supreme hour of His victory. 
This presence of the Personal God, a presence not 
made by our faith, but disclosed to our faith that 
we may believe and adore, is secured to the faithful 
in their generations by ordinances, instruments, and 
institutions adapted to that end. 

But how is this done ? What is the system 
by which shall be perpetually realized to us men 
the presence of the Personal God ? I say the 
presence of God in Person : that is what we need ; 
not merely influence emanating from Him, talk of 
Him, symbols to help us to think of Him, subjective 
impressions of our own concerning Him ; but Him- 
self. That system is known as the Holy Catholic 
Church. That Church is described in the Scripture 
as a " Body," and a " Kingdom." Christ announced 



SA CERDOTAL, AND SA CRAMENTAL S YSTEM. 5 3 

the intention to found it, the determination to pro- 
tect and defend it. " On this rock," that is, as the 
fathers say, on the rock of His own divinity, " I will 
build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not pre- 
vail against it." 1 The Church is called a Body, and a 
Kingdom; these descriptive names are significant. 
They carry us out of the region of things speculative 
and into that of fact and reality. A kingdom is an 
organization ; a body is a vital organism. A king- 
dom may hold restless and troublesome speculators 
within it ; a body may contain a fanciful, unstable 
soul. But the kingdom and the body are not to be 
confounded with our notions about them, nor with 
the thought-work or hand-work accomplished by 
their agency. In and by a practical visible or- 
ganization, in and by a vital spiritual organism, 
God was to remain personally present among 
men, " omnibus diebus usque ad consummationem 
sceculi." 3 " Lo, I am with you all days, even 
unto the end of the world." And as is the case 
with many other of the operations, of His hands, 
this arrangement for keeping us in the truth is 
partly simplicity, and partly mystery. There are 
aspects in which the body and the kingdom look as 
if we could understand them ; there are others in 
which, study as we will, we are baffled by what we 
see. Therefore this also is an article of the faith, 
this confession of ours, " I believe in the Holy 
Catholic Church." It was revealed to faith, not 
1 S. Matt. xvi. 1 8. 2 S. Matt, xxviii. 20. 



54 CHRISTIANITY A DOGMATIC, 

to sight, that God was in the world, in that worn 
and defaced Figure which men beheld in the Holy- 
Land long ago, and on which they looked with 
amazement and absolute incredulity when it hung 
before them crucified on the gibbet. It is revealed to 
faith, not to sight, that God is now in the world, in 
that sadly-rent and sore-tried Mystical Body of His, 
and under the simple rites which announce His 
neighborhood and realize it to us. " / believe in 
God : " yea, moreover, " 1 'believe in one Holy Catho- 
lic and Apostolic Church." They are articles of one 
and the same body of truth. 

And now let us see how, under this abiding mys- 
tery, He meets us, and how the religion works 
along the lines of character and life. Remember, 
always, that the religion is still, as ever, Jesus 
Christ the Son of God the Saviour. What He is, 
that must the religion be, which is but Himself in 
a supplemental manifestation. They who accept 
the religion find themselves at once in a zone of 
spiritual and supernatural facts. They are initiated 
into a Kingdom and grafted into a Body ; they are 
brought into living relation with the powers of the 
world to come. Those powers act first for the 
regeneration of the nature. Man " must be born 
again ; " ' and this is the work of the Holy Ghost, 
who " worketh where He listeth," as " Lord and 
Giver of Life." 2 The entrance into this Kingdom 
and this Body is effected through a sacrament, as 

1 S. John iii. 3. 3 Nicenc Creed. 



SA CERDOTAL, AND SA CRAMENTAL SYSTEM, 5 5 

through a portal ; " the outward and visible sign of 
an inward and spiritual grace ; " ' grace and sign one, 
so that the grace cannot be had but through the 
sign, and that whenever the sign is duly exhibited 
to a qualified subject the grace is surely given. By 
baptism a man is made a member of Christ's Body ; 
the stupendous mystery of the Incarnation takes 
him up into itself ; the door of the Father's house 
is opened wide ; he enters, the adopted child of 
God. What presence can be closer than that of 
one's own flesh ? Why, in Holy Matrimony, are 
man and wife one, unless because therein they are 
made one flesh ? It is the apostle's argument : " He 
that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man 
ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and 
cherisheth it." 2 Even so with the Lord and the 
Church, " for," saith the apostle, " we are members 
of His Body, of His Flesh, and of His Bones." 3 
So then in Holy Baptism men are taken into God, 
in such wise that He and they are united in the 
Flesh of Jesus Christ, and Christ is Present with 
them and they with Him ; nor can words be found 
more apt to express it than those in which each 
little child declares his faith, when, taught by our 
loving Mother, he acknowledges himself to be " a 
member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor 
of the Kingdom of Heaven." 4 

What begins in one mystery is maintained in an- 

1 Church Catechism. 2 Ephes. v. 29. 

8 Ephes. v. 30. * Church Catechism. 



56 CHRISTIANITY A DOGMATIC, 

other. New-born into the Body and the Kingdom 
by supernatural means, we are nourished and kept 
alive by ordinances which are also supernatural. 
The Body and Blood of Christ are to be the food of 
souls. Nor are these a dead body and a dead 
blood ; God forbid ! But they are the True Body 
and Blood of that Christ who was dead and is alive 
for evermore. Nor yet do we feed on them ideally 
and in imagination, in contemplation merely and 
devout reverie ; for then were we back again in the 
old slough of " views," theories, and opinions. But 
this is a true feeding on a True Body ; the Presence 
which came to man from without, confronting him, 
and demanding his allegiance, still confronts him 
and asks his love. In one mystical ordinance men 
enter as living souls into the Kingdom ; in another 
they feed upon the tree of life in that new King- 
dom, and their life becometh " a long life, even for- 
ever and ever." • 

Thus made alive, and thus kept alive, man has all 
that he needs for the full development of his nature ; 
all, at the cost of one thing, self-renouncing faith. 
The intellect, the heart, the affections, the imagina- 
tion, the will ; God has taken thought for all and 
made provision for all. The moral sense, the aes- 
thetic sense, the spiritual sense, yea, moreover, the 
physical sense; these, which go to make up the 
full man, are met and satisfied, and from a plane 
higher than that of this present existence. " For 
1 Psalms xxi. 4. 




SA CERDOTAL, AND SA CRAMENTA L SYSTEM. S7 

Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more ; 
death hath no more dominion over Him." l And 
the man who is in Christ is brought into life and 
immortality, and, by faith, inherits the promise, 
" he that believeth in Me, though he were dead yet 
shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in 
Me shall never die." a To each demand of the re- 
generate nature comes a response from the world 
above. The intellect finds its object of supreme 
contemplation in that God to whom it owes its ran- 
som from the bedlam of doubt. The moral nature 
finds its rule of action in that law " whose seat is the 
bosom of God, and whose voice is the harmony of 
the world." The imagination sees, as in a mirror, 
that infinite beauty which fills, absorbs, and makes 
it content. We who were born in Christianity, and 
bred up in its ways, who dwell in an atmosphere 
saturated with its ideas, and live and move and 
have our being in it, can with difficulty, if at all, con- 
ceive what its relation must have been to men dis- 
tracted by pagan philosophy, demoralized by pagan 
maxims, and degraded by pagan sins. It must have 
been like emerging from pestilential charnels and 
nocturnal paths into the broad daylight, the green 
pastures, and unspeakable inner peace. " My Peace 
I give unto you ; not as the world giveth give I 
unto you." 3 They found themselves at once pro- 
vided with a faith for the mind, a law for the life, 

1 Romans vi. 9. 2 S. John xi. 25, 26. 

8 S. John xiv. 27. 



58 CHRISTIANITY A DOGMATIC, 

grace for the heart, and a straight road to God. In 
that religion was the satisfaction of the " desire of 
all nations : " ' truth for the intellect, to guide it in 
things natural, to bring within its reach things super- 
natural. In that religion was exhibited the soli- 
tary instance of a perfect life, and that life was 
cheerfully proposed for imitation. In that religion 
were the germs of a stately and sublime ritual, such 
as might fill the senses with a beauty which affects 
them, and satisfy the impulse to " worship the Lord 
with holy worship." 2 Faith had its object ; the 
will its motive ; freedom its test. Yet everything 
centred in Jesus Christ : He was the sum and sub- 
stance of all. To believe, was to believe in Him ; 
to live aright, was to imitate him ; to worship ac- 
ceptably, was to worship through Him. " Through 
Jesus Christ our Lord : " it is the formula of the 
Church's perpetual devotion ; when to the Al- 
mighty Father she presents Jesus Christ, and her- 
self in Him, and prays for what she needs through 
that Oblation without which none may come to the 
Father. Here are the truth, the law, the service of 
the kingdom ; and this is an everlasting kingdom 
which shall not pass away. 

I have shown you how it pleased God to main- 
tain His Personal Presence among us. It is tire- 
some to repeat ; but there are truths which need to 
be incessantly repeated in order that they may stick 
fast in the mind of the hearer, and stay there ; for 
1 Haggai ii. 7. 2 Psalms xxix. 2. 



SA CERDOTAL, AND SA CRAMENTAL SYSTEM, 59 

the words of this teaching are " as nails fastened by 
the masters of assemblies." ' I shall therefore wind 
up this evening's instruction by impressing on you 
what it seems to me most necessary to remember, 
when considering our question of the readjustment 
of Christianity to the needs of the day. Let me 
say what it were no harm to repeat over and over 
till every man, woman, and child in the congrega- 
tion knew it by heart. 

The system of the Holy Catholic Church, as 
displayed in its authentic documents, is dogmatic, 
sacerdotal, and sacramental. It was certainly that 
at first. Dogmatic : for Christ demanded a confes- 
sion of His Divinity, and directed his apostles to 
teach a certain positive truth ; and neither could be 
done without dogmatic language. Sacerdotal : for 
Christ was a Priest, in the strict sense of the word ; 
and He offered a sacrifice as every priest must. 
Sacramental: for He instituted two great sacra- 
ments, and said that without these, ordinarily, no 
man can be saved. 2 What shall hinder us from 
drawing the conclusion that a system which began 
as dogmatic, sacerdotal, and sacramental, was in- 
tended to retain that character ? What other con- 
clusion is reasonable ? What can upset the pre- 
sumption ? Certainly the burden of proof rests on 
those who take a different view ; and so heavily 
does it press on them that they find no escape from 

1 Eccles. xii. it. 

3 S. Mark xvi. 16 ; S. John vi. 53. 



60 CHRISTIANITY A DOGMATIC, 

their difficulty but to assume, at the start, that 
" sacerdotalism" and " sacramentalism " must be false, 
just as the infidel assumes, in his argument against 
Christianity, that, anyhow, " supernaturalism " must 
be rejected as incredible. Let us have no unproved 
allegations of that sort ; let us hear the witnesses. 
Undoubtedly the religion was at first dogmatic, 
sacerdotal, and sacramental. Christ came into this 
world a High Priest, to make an atonement for sin ; 
" He suffered for our sins, the Just for the unjust, 
that he might bring us to God." 1 He did not cease 
to be a High Priest when He left the earth ; the 
work goes on perpetually; what He did on earth 
was only the beginning of a long, long office and 
ministry : " He abideth a Priest forever after the 
order of Melchizedek." 2 The presence by which men 
were helped, and brought out of darkness into light, 
was the personal presence of One who is called by 
the sacerdotal name, and does the sacerdotal work. 
'Apxtepevs (Greek), Pontifex (Latin), High Priest 
(English). Again it was a sacramental system, hav- 
ing ordinances which bear that name ; rites, simple 
at first glance, but containing what defies the human 
wit to explain ; rites, so strange that the carnal mind 
has ever revolted from what we are taught concern- 
ing them, as when we are required to believe that 
together with an affusion of water God the Holy 
Ghost appropriates a human soul and makes of a 
human body a temple for Himself to dwell in ; or, 
1 i Peter iii. 18. 2 Hebrews vi. 20. 



SA CERDOTA Z, A ND SA CRA ME NT A L S YSTEM. 6 1 

harder still, when we are told that, by tasting of 
what, to the eye of sense, are mere bread and wine, 
we feed on that Body and Blood of Christ where- 
with He purchased the salvation of men, and which 
are inseparably united to the Godhead in His Per- 
son, and that our sinful bodies are made clean by 
His Body, and our souls washed through His most 
Precious Blood. 

Next, mark, that what this system was at first, it 
continues to be. The Priest never dies ; the Re- 
ligion is Himself; the Body is that of the High 
Priest, its life is that of its Head, all its members 
are priests unto God. 1 The sacraments instituted 
by Him are " generally necessary unto salvation." 
Men are lifted out of the natural order and placed 
in the supernatural. By a hierarchy here on earth 
the divine priesthood of Jesus Christ is made effi- 
cient ; and through mystical rites does the vital cur- 
rent of the Incarnate Life flow on. 2 

Once more, what came as a Fact remains a Fact. 
What was God's at the beginning is God's to-day. 
The system was not the invention of men ; it grew 
not out of their thoughts ; it cannot be affected by 
their theories or fancies, save in this way, that it 
may be hidden from their sight, and so rendered in- 
effective so far as they are concerned. Above us is 
a broad firmament, toward which we may ascend ; or 

1 i Peter ii. 5, 9 ; Rev. i. 6. 

2 See the whole body of the Fathers for the first 600 years 
Passim, also all the ancient liturgies, a discretion. 



62 CHRISTIANITY A DOGMATIC, 

else, if we prefer, we may blindfold ourselves, shut 
out deliberately the magnificent view, and, groping 
about here, after the manner of the philosophers, go 
daily deeper into the darkness of our own thoughts. 
If now you ask me how we know that this was 
and is the system, and that these were its objects, I 
reply, that we know it from history. The Church 
exists to-day ; her annals fill the world : we trace 
them as we trace those of earthly empires ; we can 
thus go back a hundred years, three hundred, twelve 
hundred ; it is a case of simple historical investiga- 
tion. From the prelate who presides over this dio- 
cese to Seabury and White, from Sumner and 
Blomfield to Ken and Laud ; back still to the Inno- 
cents and the Gregories ; to Augustine of Canter- 
bury and Augustine of Africa ; to Chrysostom and 
Irenaeus and Ignatius ; to Clement and Linus ; to 
Timothy and Titus, and up to the days of the Apos- 
tles ; it is plain walking, plain enough for any child. 
Men have disputed concerning the few first years, 
taking advantage of what slight mist may over- 
hang the prospect. But the moment the veil lifts, 
and things come clearly into view, we see in sub- 
stance what is seen to-day ; a Visible Church, her- 
self a mystery, claiming to be of divine institution, 
and to have the everlasting promises, organized un- 
der a settled government, 1 performing her functions 
through a hierarchy, converting the nations by the 

1 Time is closing up some lines of controversy. The 
reader is referred to Bishop Lightfoot's recently published 






SA CERDOTAL, AND SA CRAMENTAL S YSTEM. 6$ 

preaching of an Atoning Mediator between heaven 
and earth, healing them by the waters of baptism, 
feeding them by the sacramental bread and wine. 
She teaches men the Way, the Truth, the Life, in 
Jesus Christ ; she brings men into the Kingdom of 
Jesus Christ ; she keeps them up to their duty by 
helps from Jesus Christ ; she worships God in sol- 
emn liturgy, through Jesus Christ ; she teaches 
them to think true thoughts, to do right acts, and 
lift up holy hands, " to love mercy, do justly, and 
walk humbly with their God." This is but Nat- 
ural Religion carried out in and through the Incar- 
nation of the Word. It is Knowledge and Moral- 
work on the Apostolic Fathers, for what must be considered 
as the finishing strokes in the Ignatian controversy. " It is 
plain that in those parts of Syria and Asia Minor, at all events, 
with which Ignatius is brought in contact, the Episcopate, 
properly so called, is an established and recognized institu- 
tion." . . . " The strange audacity of writers like 
Daille, who placed the establishment of Episcopacy as late 
as the beginning of the third century, need not detain us ; for 
no critic of the Ignatian epistles, however adverse, would 
venture now to take up this extreme position." . . . 
"Throughout Asia Minor and Syria it (the Episcopate) was 
universal. Probably also this was the case in the farther 
East. So likewise," he continues, with "the Gallican 
churches," which " would naturally adopt the organization 
which prevailed in the communities in Asia Minor from 
which they were spiritually descended." And again, "it 
would be an excess of skepticism, with the evidence before 
us, to question the existence of the Episcopate as a distinct 
office from the presbyterate in the Roman Church " (The 



64 CHRISTIANITY A DOGMATIC, 

ity, it is Love and Obedience, it is Joy and Praise. 
And this is Christianity ; this is the Religion of 
Jesus Christ ; this is what men desire to readjust. 
To venture on such a work, while in ignorance of 
what the religion is, would be madness. To ven- 
ture on such a work refusing to hear and accept the 
Church's own account of herself, suppressing her 
own witness, taking the testimony of the partisan 
who hates the characteristic elements of her system, 
assuming that we know more about Christianity 
than they who went before us, this would not merely 
be impiety and rebellion, it would be the folly which 
defeats itself, God save us and the age from any 

Apostolic Fathers, Part II., S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp, by J. 
B. Lightfoot, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D., Bishop of Durham, 
vol. i., pp. 376-77, 380-81). These conclusions are the 
more important, because of the well-known view of the 
learned Bishop, which he still maintains, that the New Tes- 
tament contains no direct and indisputable notices of a lo- 
calized Episcopate in the Gentile churches ; a movable one 
he admits. But this is to narrow the thing down to so fine 
a point that there seems little left worth contending for by 
the opponents of Episcopacy, and the statement in the Pre- 
face to our Ordinal is fully justified by this great student and 
scholar ; while our contention is strengthened, that the fact 
of its extension, and general recognition, during the life-time 
of the contemporaries of our Lord and the companions and 
pupils of His apostles, is strong presumptive evidence of its 
Divine institution, so strong that the burden lies on those 
who deny it ; while they ought surely to give us something 
better than their private interpretation of the New Testa- 
ment, unverified by the general witness of the Church. 



SA CERBOTAL, AND SA CRAMENTAL SYSTEM. 65 

more work like that, and bring men back by His 
persuasive power, till the mind of the children turn 
to the fathers, and till we who see in the records of 
the past the image of present sorrows, see also in 
the mode whereby men were helped once, the one 
and only way in which those can be rescued now, 
whose steps are gone astray and " whose life draw- 
eth nigh unto hell." 



£be Hnti^Sacramental ano anti^Dog* 

matic Spirit in tbe Cburcb is 

Essentially tbe Same as tbe 

Spirit of jpbilosopbic 

nationalism. 



LECTURE IV. 

THE ANTI-SACRAMENTAL AND ANTI-DOGMA- 
TIC SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH IS ESSENTIALLY 
THE SAME AS THE SPIRIT OF PHILOSOPHIC 
RATIONALISM. 

" The shew of their countenance doth witness against 
them." — Isaiah iii. 9. 

In proceeding with my subject this evening, let 
me commence by observing that we have reached 
a dividing-point in these Conferences. I have 
spoken to you, thus far, of Christ, and of the 
Church. Men have talked, and are talking still, of 
some notable things which they propose to do, by 
way of commending Christ and the Church to the 
confidence and regard of the age. I doubt whether 
this can be done, while the age remains what it is, 
without sacrificing Christ and the Church to the 
Spirit of the Age. Unfortunately these reform 
measures invariably involve assaults, covert or open, 
on the Church of History and the Christ of the 
Catholic Creed. The Church which shall be ac- 
cepted of the age must be a new Church, an undog- 
matic Church, a Church having neither priesthood 
nor sacraments ; the organization which has existed 



70 ANTI-SACRAMENTAL AND ANTI-DOGMATIC 

from the Apostles' time ' is to be swept away ; we 
shall have a liberal and free republic in place of the 
old Kingdom of God. I submit that in the course 
of these readjustments Christianity itself would be 
destroyed, and that this religion of Neo-Christianity 
would have no better title to the last half of the 
name than the religion of Mahomet or of Mormon. 2 
And the Christ who is to reclaim the allegiance of 
the coming age is to be either our own Lord, dragged 
from His throne and degraded to our level, as man 
and man only, or else it is to be an ideal Christ, dis- 
tilled from the alembic of philosophic thought and 
floating wisp-like through man's religious dream. 
One of our modern rationalists averred, not long 
since, that he had never known how much he owed 
to Christ until he left off worshipping Him as God 
and came to see Him as a mere man like himself. 
That is readjustment with a vengeance ; and with 
equal modesty is it announced by others that the 
Church is no organized and visible Kingdom, but 
the expression of continuous Christian thought. 
Assumptions like these indicate the mind of the 
day. We meet them by the counter-statements that 
Christ and the Church arc one ; that Christ cannot 
be readjusted, because He is God over us all ; that 

1 " It is evident unto all men, diligently reading Holy Script- 
ure and ancient authors,, that from the Apostles' time there 
have been these Orders of Ministers in Christ's Church — 
Bishops, Priests, and Deacons" (Preface to Ordinal). 

v II. N. Oxenham : Catholic Eschatology, p. xviii. 



SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH. 7 1 

the Church cannot be readjusted, as to her faith, her 
constitution, and her powers, because she is the 
Body of Christ and the Kingdom of God, and, like 
her divine Head, " the same " in those respects 
" yesterday, and to-day, and forever." 

I fear not to assert, and am sure of being able to 
maintain, that in the modern proposals to revise, 
correct, and amend the Christian Religion as thus 
far presented, there is invariably a tendency to ob- 
scure the truth concerning Jesus Christ as God of 
God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, con- 
substantial with the Father, and to upset the Church 
as a dogmatic, sacerdotal, and sacramental system, 
an organized Kingdom, and a living witness to the 
Living God. Let us- now proceed to inquire 
whence these proposals come. They come from the 
outside world. The voice which we hear is the 
voice of the spirit of the age. And to know exactly 
what weight it carries, we must make a brief study 
of the condition of the world at the present day. 
We must ask whether, to any extent, old phe- 
nomena have reappeared, whether old positions 
have been occupied anew ; whether signs can be de- 
tected of a trouble substantially the same as that 
under which society was laboring in the day when 
Christ came among us. If these things are so, we 
may proceed to ask whether any general cause of the 
trouble can be detected ; we must know what it is. 
Step by step the conclusion may be reached, that 
the modern revolt from Christ and the Church, 



72 ANTI-SACRAMENTAL AND ANTI-DOGMATIC 

from the Christ of the Creed and the Church of 
History, is due to the working of a rationalistic phil- 
osophy among us ; and furthermore, that this philo- 
sophic spirit has infected and does powerfully influ- 
ence large numbers of persons classed as Christians 
in our tables of statistics of religion. There is a 
unity in truth ; there is a similar unity in error. 
All truth is one, all error is one. And it looks as if 
the spirit of anti-dogmatic, anti-sacramental, and 
anti-sacerdotal Protestantism — the spirit which, jus- 
tifying its name, protests perpetually against the 
principles and system of the Church — is actually a 
mild or mitigated form of that very rationalism 
which denies the supernatural, rejects revelation, 
and finds no place for God in the w r orld or for 
Christ in the human heart and soul. I think it can 
be shown that the choice to-day is between a faith 
which reposes in a revelation to us through Christ 
and the Church, and an incertitude which is the 
natural outcome of modern philosophic rationalism. 
And what I call you to observe next is, that the re- 
ligious community is deeply infected with that 
spirit ; and that our danger does not lie at all in the 
existence of that spirit (for it is the old spirit of anti- 
christ which has been at work from the beginning, 
and shall continue to let until it be taken away '), 
but in this portentous fact, that it is so largely de- 
veloped among those who bear the Christian name 

1 2 Thess. ii. 7. 



SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH. 73 

and are taken by the community for representatives 
of the Christian Religion. 

In speaking of the second coming of the Lord, S. 
Paul says that, before that day arrives, there shall 
be " a falling away ; " ' some wide and general apos- 
tasy, some notable abandonment of religion. His 
words do but echo the Master's question : " When 
the Son of Man cometh shall he find faith on the 
earth ? " a Many are convinced that the signs of 
the times prognosticate the approach of that appal- 
ling state of things. There is a very long " Danger- 
line," on which trouble is brewing from one end to 
the other, from the right wing down through the 
centre to the left. I hope I am not uncharitable ; 
I should be glad if it could be shown that my view 
of the matter is incorrect ; but it looks as if the 
truth was in danger of being slaughtered in the 
house of its friends, in their inveterate habit of con- 
doning heresy and compromising with error. Here 
are men who bear the name of Christ, and men 
who reject Him ; see how the colors, from the bright- 
ness of belief to the blackness of infidelity, shade im- 
perceptibly into one another. Stand these men up 
like soldiers in line, dressed right, a smooth, long 
front ; glance at the perspective and mark well what 
you see. " The parade is formed." Go slowly 
along the ranks : what have we here ? orthodox and 
unorthodox, old schools and new schools, trinita- 

1 2 Thess. ii. 3. 2 S. Luke xviii. 8. 



74 ANTI-SACRAMENTAL AND ANTI-DOGMATIC 

rian Christian and unitarian Christian, Calvinistic 
Christian and Universalist Christian, stiff and old- 
fashioned, easy and liberal. Farther on we come to 
skeptics, agnostics, and infidels. Now if you study 
this enormously long line of men, if, like an inspect- 
ing officer, you pass up and down the ranks, resolved 
to find out how their thoughts work, and to reach 
the final principle on which they would stake their 
convictions, you may come to this conclusion, that 
far apart as the extremities are — and it is like the 
distance from east to west — yet is there among 
them a certain unity, one common habit of thought, 
a marked likeness which proves relationship. Let 
us put the believers in the right wing and the unbe- 
lievers in the left. In the beliefs and unbeliefs there 
is the resemblance of a common origin ; a final prin- 
ciple of negation which makes the whole company 
kin. I shall try to justify this view of the case by 
citing certain peculiar characteristics of the popular 
religion of the day. 

That it has its marked characteristics is what no 
thoughtful observer can doubt : that these are also 
the characteristics of the popular unbelief of the day 
seems to need no demonstration. Take, for exam- 
ple, the intense dislike of dogmatic teaching. You 
find it just as strongly marked in Christian congre- 
gations as in the infidel schools. "The time shall 
come when they will not endure sound doctrine.'" 
What description more accurately fits the age, 
1 2 Tim. iv. 3. 



SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH. 75 

whether it be considered on the religious or the ir- 
religious side ? Read the reports of the sermons of 
the Sunday in Monday's newspaper : how seldom 
do you light on aught to help or cheer you ? The 
favorite orator is he who most boldly asserts his 
independence of theological trammels, who most 
noisily and insolently defies the authority of the 
Church. 1 There are many devout and learned men 
who preach the simple Gospel, honestly, to their 
flocks, and are never mentioned ; while he who fills 
the air with parodoxes, extravagances, and fanciful 
conceits of his own may count on having his dis- 
courses reported in full, and scattered in hundreds 
of thousands of copies all over the land. " We 
want no dogma," say the people ; " we want elec- 
tric, magnetic, original men ; something fresh, new, 
bold, something to oust the old theology. Out of 
the old ruts ! let us have new departures, new 
phrases, new formulas ! " It is the language of 
many who still profess themselves Christians. To 
what does this tend ? What does it imply ? Ob- 
serve, and be it never forgotten, that without dog- 
matic terms it is impossible to state what Christi- 
anity is. Unless I use the words of the Creed, I 
cannot tell you, or myself, or anyone else, " who the 
Son of Man is," or what I owe to Him, or what He 
does for me. Is the dislike of those words, the dis- 
gust for those intelligible terms, which I find among 

1 " The Church hath authority in controversies of faith ." 
— Art. xx. 



/6 ANTI-SACRAMENTAL AND ANTI-DOGMATIC 

believers and unbelievers alike, a sign that the be- 
liever is at his last gasp, and about to surrender to 
the unbeliever? Is it a sign that the believer is 
nearing the point at which he will confess himself 
of Hegel rather than of Christ ? Here stands a 
group of men saying, " We are Christians ; we be- 
lieve in Christ ; but we want nothing doctrinal or 
dogmatic ; we accept the Bible, but we want no dog- 
matic religion." Some way off is another group 
who say : " We cordially agree with you in your dis- 
gust for doctrine and dogma ; but you do not go far 
enough ; more consistent than you, we reject the 
Bible and religion of any kind ; the old theology is 
obsolete verbiage; men have outgrown it; let it die 
out of mind." The distance between these groups 
may seem far; but the path from one to the other 
is direct and smooth. 

Another characteristic of popular religion is its 
indifference to truth. It is alleged : Whatever one 
thinks to be true is good enough truth for him. 
The logical conclusions, drawn by the younger 
minds, are that truth is an uncertain thing, that it is 
of very small importance, that there is no such thing 
as truth outside the mind of the individual thinker. 
The religionist who says that the faith cannot be 
wrong while the life is right, and that it makes no 
difference what a man believes so long as he is con- 
scientious and sincere, is the natural all}' of the 
skeptic, the agnostic, and the infidel. kl Ye shall 
know the truth, and the truth shall make you 



SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH. /7 

free:" 1 so spoke the Author and Finisher of our 
faith. Yet here — amazing sight ! — are Christians, 
who, either through fear of giving offence, or from a 
nervous dread of seeming to take too much upon 
themselves, are so excessively guarded that you 
cannot tell what they hold ; they will affirm nothing 
without an apology for their boldness ; they would 
not say of any particular truth that belief in it is 
necessary unto salvation, or of any particular error 
that it is fatal to the soul. What is this but sub- 
stantially the position of the rationalist and the 
skeptic ? His creed has been cleverly summed up 
as follows : 

1. It is uncertain whether Truth exists. 

2. It is certain that it cannot be found. 

3. It is folly to boast of possessing it. 

4. Man's work and duty consist, not in possessing 
but in seeking it. 

5. His happiness and true dignity consist in the 
pursuit of it. 

6. The pursuit of truth is an end, to be engaged 
in for its own sake. 

7. As philosophy is the love, but not the posses- 
sion, of wisdom, so religion is the love, but not the 
possession, of truth. 

Such is the view of the skeptic. The truth is not 

a fixed, defined, and well-known treasure which, 

like the pearl of great price, may be had by you, 

by me, by any one who will give what it costs and 

1 S. John viii. 32. 



78 ANTI-SACRAMENTAL AND ANTI-DOGMATIC 

buy it ; but it is an indefinable, unattainable, unthink- 
able somewhat, never to be discovered in this world ; 
while the chase of this ignis fatuus, though aware 
that it will perpetually elude pursuit, is noble, de- 
licious, and elevating beyond all other things. And 
if one dare to stand up and deny a position so ab- 
surd, and say, " I know whom I have believed ; I 
have the truth ; you may have it also if you will," 
at once an uproar is made ; the whole city is filled 
with confusion, as when S. Paul set the worship- 
pers of Diana by the ears ; some cry one thing and 
some another ; it is said, that this is dogmatism and 
presumption ; that all are right who are sincere ; that 
he is superstitious who pretends to know more 
than the rest ; that all creeds are right in a way ; 
that the truth is within the heart, and not outside 
of us ; with other confused exclamations, which 
amount in sum total to the denial of these first 
principles in religion — that truth is truth, whether 
men know it or not, and that any man may know 
it if he seek it in the right way. 

To pass to the consideration of another character- 
istic of popular religion — the repudiation of the 
sacerdotal and sacramental system by those who, 
notwithstanding, believe in the priesthood and sac- 
rifice of Christ. It is easy to trace the relationship 
between believers of this class and men who reject 
not only the sacerdotal and sacramental in religion 
in general, but the priesthood and atoning work of 
the Lord also. The prevalence of a widespread in- 






SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH. 79 

difference to religion is a formidable aspect of the 
day. That indifference is shown by the educated 
and the ignorant alike ; the jennesse dorte of our 
time, the youth of our schools and universities, on 
whom we should be relying for our civil and social 
security in the coming age, are infected, 

" Sickening of a vague disease ; " 

while the toiling masses of the people, the laboring 
classes, are, to an appalling extent, alienated from 
Christian faith and Christian standards of morals. 
What wonder that this is so ? It sounds sometimes 
as if a great cry were going up all over the land, 
because there is no household but has its dead — 
dead to faith, dead to Christ, dead to the hope of a 
better life. Why not ? Consider that for a hun- 
dred years or more it has been the effort of religious 
teachers of the so-called evangelical school to kill 
belief in the Church, the sacraments, and the litur- 
gical and institutional ordinances of Christianity ; 
this has been their aim, and they have succeeded 
beyond their hopes. For years, and years, and 
years, we have heard teaching like this : " You 
must believe in Christ, but in Christ apart from the 
Church, and apart from the sacraments, and apart 
from dogma and form. Christ is all. The Church 
has, practically, nothing to do with your salvation, 
being only an invisible body of good persons known 
to God, without general organization, or law-making 
power, or means of exercising control or discipline. 



SO ANTI-SACRAMENTAL AND ANTI-DOGMATIC 

Sacraments, except as bare signs, have no value ; 
they are not saving ordinances ; never mind the sac- 
raments, as long as you have Christ." The logical 
outcome is seen in the apathy of many, and the ab- 
solute hostility of more. Why should they " hear 
the Church ? " It has been dinned into their ears 
incessantly that the Church is not a reality, but a 
name. Why should they submit to baptism or re- 
ceive Holy Communion ? It has been dinned into 
them perpetually that sacraments hide Christ. And 
experience demonstrates this, that when Christ is 
thus preached " of envy and contention," divorced 
from His Church, which is His Body and His 
Bride, and robbed of those sacraments which He 
instituted as " generally necessary to salvation," ' 
the dethronement of Christ Himself is not far away. 
Think this out ; test it by the history of rational 
religion. That the priesthood was changed, 2 not 
abolished ; that a line of Christian priests succeeded 
the old line of Levi; that there are men among us 
who, by virtue of their ordination can do what no 
one else can do unless in like manner ordained ; that 
these men are stewards of the mysteries of God, of- 
ficially entrusted with them and dispensing them ; 
these ideas are regarded by many Christian people 
as relics of Romish superstition. The only ministry 
they recognize is that of preacher of the word and 

1 Church Catechism : getter aliter y i.e., to men in general. 

2 "The priesthood being changed," not abolished (He- 
brews vii. 12). 



SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH. 8 1 

head of a congregation, who takes his commission 
from the people, and has no gifts differing in kind 
from those of his flock. The ordinances commonly 
called sacraments, if retained, are to be regarded 
merely as edifying forms or relics of antiquity. Bap- 
tism may be occasionally administered, but with no 
superstitious impression of its necessity ; it is a sign 
to outsiders ; it expresses the belief that God has 
already accomplished a work of grace in the soul, 
or the hope that He will do so at some future epoch. 
The new birth into Christ may come before baptism 
or after ; the one moment of time in which it cannot 
come is that in which baptism is administered. As 
for the Lord's Supper, it should be considered only 
as a commemorative feast, or, at the utmost, as a 
venerable ordinance, on occasion of which (though 
not by which, instrumentally) God helps pious 
Christians with the ordinary influences of religion. 
Regeneration in baptism, the Real Presence of the 
Lord in Holy Communion, the grace of holy orders, 
the strength in Confirmation, the sacramental dignity 
and sanctity of Holy Matrimony, the benefit of Ab- 
solution — these are all rejected as parts of an effete 
and cumbrous system of error. It is not seen what 
use there is of Bishops in the Church, while the idea 
of an Apostolic Succession is a subject for scornful 
mirth. Thus do men go on, professing to believe 
in Christ, but rejecting the ordinances and institu- 
tions of the religion which, from of old, has borne 
His name. They think they can do this with im- 
6 



82 ANTI-SACRAMENTAL AND ANTI-DOGMATIC 

punity, and that this persistent habit of denial and 
protest will not eventually tell against the things 
they still hold as true. They do not seem to ob- 
serve that in principle they are one with the oppo- 
nents of Christianity and the enemies of the Cross. 
Close to them are men who reject not merely the 
sacerdotal and the sacramental, but the supernatural 
to boot, and call them (justly ?) weak and inconsistent 
in stopping where they do ; who reject the super- 
natural in the Church and out of it, in the ordi- 
nances of religion and also in the Scriptures, in the 
human priest and in the Divine High Priest also, in 
history, in personal experience, in the government of 
the world, in the laws of the universe. They do not 
observe where the road toward the platform of 
naked Naturalism begins ; that it is paved by the 
negations uttered by men of the Christian name ; 
that the difference between those at the one end of 
the line and those at the other is not so much a dif- 
ference on the essential principle of rationalism as a 
difference in the amount of resistance to its coercive 
force. 

Once more, consider a fact already referred to, 
the dying out of the Worship of Almighty God, 
and the forsaking of the public services of religion. 
Is not this the result of the rejection of the liturgi- 
cal and ritual system which came down to us from 
our fathers ? Is it not the outcome of undue exal- 
tation of the pulpit, and the minimizing of every- 
thing else in comparison with the work of the 






SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH. 83 

preacher ? Attendance at church has for its main 
object, among these perverted Christians, the hear- 
ing a discourse ; that is the principal feature of the 
occasion ; to worship God is a secondary intention. 
The altars, you know, were thrown down by 
Christian hands, under pretence of abating supersti- 
sion, and the pulpit was lifted up in their place. 1 
Well, to-day we find the temples of religion all but 
empty, unless some remarkable preacher be there to 
attract the curious crowd. Divine service is neg- 
lected ; any slight excuse keeps him at home whose 
conscience is yet tender ; the majority make no ex- 
cuse ; Sunday is the day for the parks, for excursions 
up the river or down the bay, for museums and 
galleries, for entertainment and recreation, without 
pretence of any religious exercise. And, when the 
altars were thrown down the " beauty of holiness " 
vanished, together with the idea of the solemn sacri- 
fice and oblation. The house of God could not be 
made too plain ; the rites performed therein could 
not be too severe ; stiff, cold, and hard was the look 
of the " meeting-house " 2 which replaced the abbey 
and the cathedral ; no music, no lights, no vest- 
ments, nor processions, nor choral song ; no crosses 

1 See Lectures on the First Book of King Edward IV. 
E. & J. B. Young & Co. 

2 It is matter of history that the New England Puritans re- 
jected the name of church, and insisted that their places of 
assemblage should be called u meeting-house ; " the town- 
meetings were held in them. 



84 ANTI-SACRAMENTAL AND ANTI-DOGMATIC 

and banners, no incense cloud, no peal of organs, no 
solemn chant of white-robed choir. The result has 
come, in the growing neglect of the day of God and 
the house of God ; while we hear the cry of those 
who demand a general secularization of Church prop- 
erty, and would fain sweep all religion away, and 
bid us cease to worship God and worship man in- 
stead ; man in the age, man in national progress, 
man in the triumphs of the mind. 

Let me note one more sign of the times. I refer 
to the corrupting of the moral sense of the people 
by setting up standards diverse from those of the 
law of God. Concession is made to those who seek 
freedom to sin, until it seems as if little remained to 
concede. And with this disappears the motive to 
noble actions. The rejection of supernatural in- 
fluences leads directly to the refusal to attempt or 
admire superhuman actions. The Heroic disap- 
pears, the fear of future punishment is lost. They 
who deny the eternal doom of the wicked grow in 
number; because men no longer realize the exceed- 
ing sinfulness of sin. Dare anyone perform a deed 
which, in past ages, would have crowned him with 
glory ? Men now shake the head ; they talk of 
foolhardiness and fanaticism, they will not imitate, 
they will not even approve. He who attempts the 
superhuman for the love of God is looked on with 
suspicion as a disturber of the general repose; such 
persons are not in harmony with the age, they must 
be warned of their eccentric turn, and bidden behave 



SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH. 85 

themselves and live like other people. Thus among 
Christians the fear of God's just wrath is lulled to 
sleep, and the notion of a supernatural life and dar- 
ing ventures of faith becomes but a dream. Now 
look farther on and see the logical end. You hear it 
said that there is no such thing as sin, nor any Moral 
Law-Giver, nor any Judge, nor even a hereafter ; no 
hell for the sinner, and no heaven for the righteous; 
in short, that " there is no better thing for a man 
under the sun than that he should eat and drink and 
be merry, for that shall abide with him," but all be- 
sides is fiction and fancy, and death is an eternal sleep. 
Here is the Philosophy of Materialism and Natural- 
ism full blown ; it looks as if it came of the blun- 
ders of those whose duty it was to have kept alight 
among us the fires of love and sacrifice, kindled 
from that realm above the stars, and never to have 
ceased meanwhile to warn men of " the worm that 
dieth not and of the fire that is not quenched, whose 
smoke riseth up for ever and ever." 1 

I could go on with this recital of the signs of 
the times : but enough has been said to illustrate 
the proposition with which I began. There is a 
remarkable unity in modern error. Here are large 
bodies of religious people who, differing widely 
on many points, agree in their dislike of dogmatic 
teaching, their indifference to positive truth, their 
rejection of the supernatural and mystical in ordi- 
nances, and their denial of the sacerdotal and sacra- 
1 S. Mark ix. 44. Rev. xix. 3. 



86 ANTI-SACRAMENTAL AND ANTI-DOGMATIC 

mental character of Christianity. Far beyond them, 
a long distance off, are persons who have actually re- 
turned to the pagan platform and pagan views, who 
do not believe that God created the heavens and the 
earth, who have no faith in a future life, who believe 
in nothing higher than humanity. And between 
those protesting and rationalizing Christians and 
these avowed agnostics and infidels, moves a crowd 
of unsettled, confused, and half-distracted people, 
tossed about by winds of doctrine, now looking this 
way, now that way, knowing not what to do ; they 
cannot go back, they dare not go on. They do not 
know what to believe; they cannot say what is 
right or what is wrong ; they are one thing to-day, 
another thing to-morrow ; to them God is " the un- 
known God ;" there may or may not be a future ; 
there may or may not be an immortal spirit in man. 
The old religion seems to them to be tottering to its 
fall, crumbling away ; " the powers of heaven are 
shaken ; " those majestic powers which once re- 
strained the lawless, comforted the sorrowful, and 
exalted the lowly, these seem to have given up the 
ghost ; the light grows dim. "Wo unto us ! for the 
day of Christianity goeth away ; for the shadows of 
the evening of a general skepticism are stretched out." ' 
Now, what I call you to observe is, that the evil, 
from one extreme through the centre to the other 
extreme, and back thence to the starting-point, is 
one ; that the cause of the trouble is one ; that what 
1 Jeremiah vi. 4. 



SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH. 87 

has brought men to this pass is the spirit of phil- 
osophic rationalism, eternal enemy of the Gospel. 
Moreover, I pray you to mark this, that the cries 
which reach our ear for essential modifications in 
the articles of the faith, reconstruction and re- 
adjustments, new terms in which to state old 
truths, freedom of thought and freedom of act, 
and leave to think and speak, every man under 
the inspiration of his own private d<zmon, that 
these cries proceed from the midst of that scene of 
intellectual, moral, and religious confusion into 
which men, under the guidance of philosophy, dis- 
guised in Christian garb, have drifted. I pointed 
out to you, in my second lecture, the condition of 
the world before the Advent of Jesus Christ. Com- 
pare it with the state of the world to-day : is not 
the likeness strong ? Do you not see the same per- 
plexity, the same multiplying of shrines to suit the 
taste of uneasy worshippers, the same blind homage 
to an Unknown Power, the same state of uncer- 
tainty about everything in heaven, in earth, and 
under the earth ? Are not men now frankly con- 
fessing their doubt of everything, till nothing seems 
left for them to doubt except their own existence ? 
Do they not quarrel, as they did of old, about 
matter and mind, soul and spirit, and vex themselves 
to know how old the earth is, and how it was made, 
and whence the visible universe proceeded ? Listen, 
and you might think you heard once more Thales 
and Lucretius, Anaximenes and Democritus, and 



88 ANTI-SACRAMENTAL AND ANTI-DOGMATIC 

the rest, at it again in dispute and debate in our 
academies of science, and the precincts of our uni- 
versities, where, perhaps, it is deemed a great merit 
to observe a strict neutrality on the subject of re- 
ligion, and neither to express nor to have any settled 
opinion on the most momentous questions which 
can be proposed to the soul of man. And as the 
spiritual thus dwindles into its marasmus, the ma- 
terial waxes fat and lusts in the same old way ; the 
worship which men deny to God, the love which 
they withhold from God, is conceded to the creat- 
ure ; a fleshy, carnal literature is eagerly read ; 
nakedness is the specialite in art schools ; women 
strip themselves bare to the public gaze ; the fame 
of the professional beauty spreads from land to land, 
and the young fool runs after her till the dart strikes 
through his liver. The errors of the old time and 
of this are the same, the sins are the same. Is not 
the cause the same ? And must not the remedy 
be the same ? Look at this procession, with the 
personages whom we know so well ; the philoso- 
pher, the hardened skeptic, the jester at sacred 
things, the immodest woman, the degraded slave, 
the bacchanal, the lascivious dancer — Pilate, Herod, 
Dives, Barabbas, Herodias and her daughter — the 
Sadducee, who believes in neither angel nor spirit ; 
the Pharisee, case-hardened in his lofty contempt for 
other men : it is a thing to watch as it goes by, as 
dreadful as the train of phantom huntsmen who came 

" As drifting leaves come through the dell," 



SPIRIT IAT THE CHURCH. 89 

circling their coveted prey, the soul of the hapless 
child, whom the mother, with cheek as April snow, 
clasped to her heart while they went around the 
Eildon tree. 

Yes, watch it till your soul turns sick, and the 
sight becomes too much to bear, and until you ask 
the question : Is this the outcome of Christianity ? 
Is this the work of the Gospel ? Where lies the re- 
sponsibility ? What is the explanation, and what 
the remedy ? Shall we reconstruct our religion, in 
hope to make things better ? or shall we let it go, 
and curse God and die ? 

No, brethren, we shall do nothing of the kind ; 
we shall not curse God, we shall not die, we shall 
not reconstruct our religion, nor cease to hold fast 
our faith. Fitting effects to their causes, we shall 
maintain, and do our best to show, that philosophy 
is responsible for these things, and not the Church. 
Under the mask of religion the spirit of philosophy 
has been undoing the work of the Gospel ; it has 
rejected the ordinances and institutions divinely ap- 
pointed to preserve the faith ; it has introduced the 
principle of rationalism into the seminaries of the- 
ology ; it has corrupted the original tradition ; it 
has set up new things in the room of the old ; it has 
made of the ministry obsequious trucklers to public 
opinion, and of the people self-confident critics ; it 
has narrowed the broad catholic truth to the formula 
of a sect, or evaporated positive doctrine into a mist 
and a sentiment ; and what we see before us is the 



90 ANTI-SACRAMENTAL AND ANTI-DOGMATIC 

result. That thing which we call Paganism was 
the result of the attempts of men, first, to hold the 
truth in unrighteousness, and then to recover it by 
their own efforts after it was lost. The conditions 
of this age have been reached by a series of similar 
blunders and mistakes. If the world be ill of the 
same old sickness, the medicine is the same. 

That seems to be the secret of the trouble. God 
Incarnate is not a Present, Living Fact ; He is but 
a thought, a feeling, a doctrine ; He is a distant 
moral and spiritual influence, a historical character 
like the old sages and benefactors of the world ; men 
no longer feel Him as a ruling monarch, whom they 
must obey. He provided against that very danger. 
He instituted a system whereby He should be re- 
alized to men, in which He should remain with 
them " all days, even to the end of the world." From 
that system they have revolted ; they have substi- 
tuted for it other expedients ; and religion has come 
to be a constant dwelling on those inventions 
whereby they have hidden Him. And so all has 
gone back into the poor, weak brain of man ; and 
man, once more set in his own opinions, has walked 
back into the darkness to which they must inevit- 
ably lead. Now what shall we do ? Shall we make 
compromise with the revived paganism of our time ? 
Shame the thought. This is our hoary foe, beaten 
down by the good swords of the Christian soldiers 
of old time, and destined to a fresh defeat in the ap- 
proaching day of better things. Shall we make 



SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH. 9 1 

compromise with those bodies around us, whose 
strange position, in contrast with our own, I have 
endeavored to depict ? Never, please God. For 
we could not do so but by surrendering the very 
principle which, if they had kept it, would have 
steadied them : obedience to authority, in place of 
private judgment ; submission to fact, in place of the 
fabrication of opinions. No, there is but one thing 
to do : to reinstate the Church Idea in the minds of 
men, to reaffirm the theology of the Incarnation, 
to present boldly the sacerdotal and sacramental 
system whereby it touches the life of man at every 
point ; and so to get unreality out of the minds and 
hearts, the principles and the actions, of the commu- 
nity. The readjustment is needed in men, not in 
the Religion which God gave them ; if we, on our 
part, are affected by the errors afloat, then we need 
readjustment also. That may be. If it is so, the 
Lord will help us to do the thing that ought to be 
done — on this condition, that we forsake our own 
way, our own wisdom, and make it our chief thought 
how we may bring back to a distracted and schism- 
rent household that salutary faith which alone can 
give it peace. 



Gbe Evil Wotk of pbilosopbs. 



LECTURE V. 

THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 

" Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and 
vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of 
the world, and not after Christ." — Colossians ii. 8. 

When the Apostle of the Gentiles addressed the 
men of Athens on Mars' Hill, he began by com- 
mending them for their great interest in the subject 
of religion. His words might be repeated with pro- 
priety in the case of our own people, throughout the 
land. None could justly accuse them of indifference 
to religious questions, or of a want of zeal in that be- 
half, sometimes according to knowledge and some- 
times expended in vain. But there are religions 
and religions ; and no contrast could be stronger 
than that between a religion once for all given to 
men in systematic form, and a religion evolving it- 
self out of the human consciousness. The religion 
of evolution must be in perpetual flux, adjusting it- 
self to times and seasons, and changing with the 
spirit of each successive age. There can be no con- 
cord between it and -a religion of which the first 
heralds might properly declare, " Though we, or an 



9^> THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 

angel from heaven, preach any other Gospel to you 
than this which we preach, let him be accursed." ' 

The difficulties which beset the question of read- 
justment are largely due to varying notions as to 
the essential character of religion. Men talk about 
Christianity ; they are not agreed as to what Chris- 
tianity is. Some persons will tell you that Chris- 
tianity is the name — since everything must have a 
name to make it intelligible — of a certain moral and 
spiritual force, unorganized, diffuse, and beneficently 
active in society. They will assure you that it is 
not an institution, nor a dogma, nor one of those 
things of which a pedigree can be written, a picture 
painted, or any exact account given ; but that it is a 
motive, an inspiration, working out into benevolent 
and virtuous actions, and practically existent only in 
them. They will talk to you of Christianity as the 
pantheists talk of God and the world. The world 
is the evolution of the infinite substance, which takes 
new shapes from age to age, and Christianity is the 
latest development of the religious instinct in man — 
the latest, highest, and best thus far, though to be 
followed, no doubt, by something better still. Chris- 
tianity is a complex thing ; in part a memory, in 
part an enthusiasm, and in part a vision of aims un- 
realized. It contains in it a sentiment of personal 
attachment to One whom all agree to admire as 
a saintly man, and many worship as divine. It 
prompts to sympathy with other people, either 
1 Gal. i. 8. 



THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 97 

through pity for human distress, or from the sense 
of a race-unity in interests and fortune. It gives a 
hope for the future, indefinite, yet sufficient to ward 
off despair as death advances for his last assault. 
Objectively regarded, Christianity is reducible to 
practical benevolence, charitable deeds, and a pure 
moral life. Subjectively it is to be kept alive by 
stirring up the emotions, by music, by fervid passion 
of prayer, by mutual converse, not, perchance, with- 
out mutual admiration. Such is Christianity, as 
seen under the lens of this keen, bright age. But, 
observe, it has no fixed form or definite outline ; it 
cannot be reduced to a system ; it cannot be de- 
scribed in terms of this world, nor is there in it any 
place for exact definitions and articles of faith. It 
has no more outward shape than heat or electricity 
or the forces of nature, being, indeed, spiritual, form- 
less, void, a kind of sacred medium wherein churches, 
denominations, schools, and individuals whirl up and 
down and round about. Such appears to be the 
view of Christianity taken by the broad and liberal 
mind. And there could not be a stronger contrast 
between this conception of Christianity and that 
which they entertain who believe in a visible Church, 
and an organized Body, and look to Christ as the 
Lord of a Kingdom complete in its appointments, 
and as easily to be identified and described as any 
secular government in any age. 

So, when we return to our old question, " Is there 
need of a readjustment of Christianity to suit the 
5 



98 THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 

times in which we live ? " it seems that a double 
answer must be given. We answer, Yes ; we an- 
swer, No. If by Christianity you mean that loose 
agency which I have endeavored to fix for the mo- 
ment for purposes of examination, or its practical 
outcome in the flabby, anaemic religionism around us, 
we say, Yes ; that certainly needs readjustment, or 
rather one might say that they who think thus of 
Christianity need very vigorous treatment of some 
sort, call it what you please. But if by Chris- 
tianity you mean the old Gospel, which propounds 
to faith a cycle of truth " not after man," ! not dis- 
covered nor invented by man, nor evolved out of 
his inward parts, but taught to him " by the revela- 
tion of Jesus Christ," 2 and applies that truth by 
means of divinely-appointed ordinances unto his sal- 
vation and sanctification, we answer, No ; that relig- 
ion needs no readjustment : the age must be read- 
justed to it, not it to the age. 

But which of these two statements of the charac- 
ter and essential nature of Christianity is true ? The 
question, like any question of fact, must be settled 
by the process of historic investigation. It is, more- 
over, a complicated question : it affects us churchmen, 
first, in our relation to the rationalism of the day, 
and, next, in our attitude toward other bodies of 
Christians. It brings before us for consideration 
that view of Christianity which may be regarded as 
the most attenuated, in which scarcely any original 
1 Gal. i. ii. »Gal. i. 21. 



THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY, 99 

element of Christianity can be discerned remaining ; 
it brings, also, before us the views of those who, 
while they do not hold the naked rationalistic theory, 
differ widely about the original form in which our re- 
ligion appeared in the world, some alleging that the 
Church had, at the start, no organized form or con- 
stitution whatever, while others allow that it had a 
constitution, but that it was Presbyterian or Congre- 
gational. I must try, in the brief time at my com- 
mand, to throw what light I can on all these per- 
plexing queries. We ask, sweeping the wide horizon 
of our differences, What was the old Religion ? We 
think that is not hard to ascertain, if men will go 
to work the right way. There are a wrong way and 
a right way of investigating any subject ; and in this 
particular case one should begin with an honest re- 
solve to take in all the evidence, without regard to 
popular theories or the current thoughts of the day. 
And here we enter a protest against appeal to the 
New Testament text without reference to exterior 
evidence as to its sense. The Christian religion is 
older than its documents ; it was not evolved from 
the New Testament ; the New Testament was an 
outgrowth of the Church. First in order came that 
Church " which is His Body, the fulness of Him 
that filleth all in all." ' She was existent, organized, 
equipped, and at her work before a line of the New 
Testament was penned ; the Gospels, Acts, and 
Epistles were written for men in full communion 
1 Eph. i. 22, 23. 



IOO THE EVIL WORK OE PHILOSOPHY, 

with her, instructed in her faith, and familiar with 
her usages. These sacred documents should not be 
subjected to any private interpretation ; the attempt 
to try to decide questions in controversy by appeal 
to them alone, without note or comment, without 
reference to the sensus communis and living witness 
of the Church, is a reversal of the rational and his- 
torical order. The New Testament contains a part 
of the evidence, but not all ; it is neither a Summa 
Tlieologica, nor a Code of Canons, nor a Directorium 
of Worship. Other witnesses have the right to be 
heard when the question in debate is whether the 
Church is only a phase of man's religious conscious- 
ness, or whether it is an organic system ; and, if it be 
an organic system, whether the original organization 
was or was not of divine appointment ; and, if it was 
of divine appointment, what that divine appoint- 
ment was. 

On these questions we insist that the whole evi- 
dence ought to be heard, and that the court should 
rule out, first, personal tastes, preferences, and preju- 
dices, and private opinions as to what ought or 
ought not to have been. The Church has a history : 
documents, some inspired and others not inspired," 
11 Holy Scripture and Ancient Authors " ' demand, 
together, our attention, with liturgies, monuments, 
inscriptions, the writings of apologists, doctors, and 
catcchists. The evidence is large and abundant. 
Remember this, that without the help of the Church 
1 Preface to the Ordinal. 



THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. IOI 

you cannot be sure of your Bible. The question 
what Scriptures are canonical depends on no man's 
private opinion, but on external testimony ; and if 
we have to fall back on that witness of the Church 
in order to discern between the true and the false 
Gospels, shall we refuse to hear her voice on other 
matters on which she is equally competent to testify ? 
I repeat : it is easy for him who will to ascertain 
the facts. Take the question of Holy Order. Is 
there now a reasonable doubt as to the evidence to 
be derived from the writings of S. Ignatius, Tertul- 
lian, and S. Cyprian as to the antiquity of Episco- 
pacy and the fact of the apostolic succession ? What 
witness should be heard against the holy martyr 
Bishop of Antioch, contemporary of our Blessed 
Lord, friend and disciple of S. John ? Take the 
question of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. Is there a 
reasonable doubt what the ancient liturgies mean ? ' 
Take the question of the Real Presence. Compare 
the views of Irenaeus, Ignatius, Augustine, with 
those of Calvin and Zwingle, and what tyro is he 
who does not see the difference ? 2 Or, again, who 

1 I refer the beginner, who desires information on this point, 
to The Liturgies of SS. Mark, James, Clement, Chrysos- 
tom, and Basil, and the Church of Malabar, by the Rev. J. 
M. Neale, D.D., and the Rev. R. F. Littledale, LL.D. 

2 Read The Doctrine of the Real Presence, as contained 
in the Fathers, from the Death of S. John the Evangelist to 
the Fourth General Council, by the Rev. E. B. Pusey, 
D.D. ; also, by the same author, The Doctrine of the Real 



102 THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 

that will but read the De Sacerdotio can fail to un- 
derstand what S. Chrysostom (whose name is be- 
fore us every time we open our Prayer Book) be- 
lieved concerning the ministry as a priestly func- 
tion ? Go back from age to age, till you reach the 
first, and are come within twenty years of the date 
of the death of the last of the Apostolic College, and 
the Kingdom of God is the grand fact in history, a 
visible, organized body, governed by bishops, wor- 
shipping with liturgical and spiritually sacrificial 
forms, presenting to faith a living Christ, Emmanuel, 
and all the time in battle with the spirit of the 
world, and with those systems of philosophy which, 
from century to century, have set up as her rivals, and 
tried to do or undo her work. 1 

Presence, as set forth in the Works of Divines and Others in 
the English Church since the Reformation. 

1 " But we may ask, What is primitive antiquity, and how 
is it to be limited ? I reject the notion of a peculiar venera- 
tion for the first three centuries only. What are we to think 
of a theory which deprives us of the example of the Catholic 
Church at the very juncture when she displays her mission 
on a larger scale and under circumstances analogous to our 
own ? Or which would, under the pretence of purity, de- 
prive us of the four great Fathers of the Greek Church, Epi- 
phanius, Basil, Nazianzen, and Chrysostom, and of the four 
Doctors of the Latin Church, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, 
and Gregory ? . . For my part, I defer with rever- 

ence to the collective voice of the Ancient Church as ex- 
ed in its Councils, and the publicly approved writings 
of its theologians, the Fathers (as they are called). It is the 
only standard to which the Church of England (of which I 



THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 103 

To this strong and, as it seems to us, unanswer- 
able argument from history various replies are made, 
some by men who seem constitutionally incapable of 
admitting any evidence in questions about religion 
which in any way offends their preconceived idea, 
and some by persons of a less radical cast, many of 
whom are in general accord with us and need but 
little to come over to us altogether. It may be al- 
leged that there was, originally, no organization of 
any kind, in Christianity : that it was left to men to 
settle for themselves, what shape if any, the King- 
dom should take, with the right in reversion to alter 
it at any future day. Against this view lies, first, a 
presumption, which could not be stronger. That 
God, who is Lord and King over the heavenly 
hierarchies, with their thrones, dominations, prin- 
cipalities, and powers, 1 who was Governor of His 
people Israel, directing in every particular the 
manner of their national existence, who had an- 
nounced the intended establishment of a grander 
and stronger Kingdom, should have left everything 
in confusion in that Kingdom, to take whatever 

am a minister) seems to profess an adherence in her author- 
ized formularies. And without pretending to rigid accuracy 
of limitation, I in general cite the writers within the period 
of the Four General Councils ; because (with the exception 
of S. Gregory the Great's writings) all the important docu- 
ments of the Church coincide with that period." — An Intro- 
duction to the Study of Dogmatic Theology, by the Rev. 
Robert Owen, D.D., pp. 11, 12. 
1 Col. i. 16; Ephes. i. 21. 



104 THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 

shape chance, or luck, or the taste and fancy of the 
primitive neophytes might determine : this is not 
only incredible, it is at variance with any reason- 
able conception of a Kingdom, and with the pro- 
phetic intimations of the object and results of its 
establishment. Nor yet does this theory accord 
with the acts of Christ, as when he gave the Keys 
of the Kingdom to Peter, and commissioned His 
apostles for their long work ; nor with the glimpses, 
in the pastoral Epistles, of offices, orders, and 
grades, distributions of power and assignments of 
duty, nor with the distinct appearance of an 
Episcopate in Crete and Ephesus before the death 
of S. Paul. And, thirdly, the theory is contra- 
dicted by the uniform tenor of Church history, 
having no support in any writer of repute in ancient 
times, and being substantially contradicted by those 
who have given us an account of the origines of 
our religion. No better instance could be given 
of the German method of evolving ideas out of the 
inner consciousness than this amazing conception of 
an absolutely amorphous Apostolic Christianity. 
It amounts to a demonstration of the credulity of 
rationalism, as applied to ecclesiastical questions. 

But there is another theory, much more respect- 
able, which we must next consider. It constitutes 
the middle term between the rationalist's theory of 
evolution and the Churchman's belief in a primitive 
Episcopacy. To three propositions we are reduced, 
of which only one can be true : 



THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 105 

That the Church had originally no organized form 
or constitution whatever. 

That the Church was Episcopal in Government 
from the beginning. 

That the Church was originally Congregational or 
Presbyterian, but that this primitive and simple type 
of government afterward degenerated into Episco- 
pacy. 

We have considered the first of these proposi- 
tions ; let us take up the third and see what it in- 
volves. 

It is assumed that the primitive Christians 
were Congregationalists or Presbyterians as to their 
form of Church government, and Calvinistic and 
Zwinglian in their doctrinal views. It is assumed 
that the system which we find in the writings of the 
ancient fathers, the liturgies, and the recorded acts 
of the Councils, was " a corrupt following " of the 
original Gospel as taught by our Lord and delivered 
to the Twelve. To this we make our reply as fol- 
lows : 

First, we object to the mode of proof. It rests 
entirely on the assumption that the New Testament 
must contain a perfect and complete picture of a 
system which was in existence many years before 
the sacred monographs were composed. It assumes 
that the New Testament must have been intended 
to present to posterity a full account of the order, 
discipline, and worship of the Kingdom ; else why 
this perpetual appeal to it with refusal to receive 
5* 



106 THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 

any other testimony ? And, evidence of the highest 
importance having been thus ruled out, the text is 
filled in with ideas in which men have been trained 
from their childhood, or to which, under the press- 
ure of popular opinion, they incline. The method 
is arbitrary and constrained ; it rests, primarily, on 
the judgment of the interpreter; it begs the ques- 
tions at issue ; it keeps us in the drift of variable 
thought ; it settles nothing ; for there never was a 
heresy or an error in the Church which men did not 
endeavor to defend by appeal to the Scriptures 
without note or comment. We are far from conced- 
ing that there is any considerable difficulty in prov- 
ing from the New Testament alone that the original 
constitution of the Church was Episcopal ; but we 
object to the method of proof, to whatever subject 
it may be applied, as essentially insufficient, irregu- 
lar, and inconclusive. But the inherent wrongness 
of the method may best be seen when we proceed to 
consider the results which would follow if the posi- 
tion of our non-Episcopal brethren could be, in that 
manner, sustained. 

For, first, it must follow that the Religion taught 
by God Incarnate, the sum of previous revelations, 
and the last that shall be made, the Gospel for which 
the men of the old world waited and by which the 
men of the new world live, that this Holy Religion, 
this pure and sincere gift to us in our deep distress, 
was, within fifty years after its establishment, marred, 
defaced, and practically subverted, by men who had 



THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 107 

seen the Lord, and were companions and pupils of 
the Apostles, who died the martyr's death, and have 
left behind them names immortal for their virtues, 
their zeal, and their faith. 

Secondly, it must follow that such men as Igna- 
tius of Antioch, Polycarp, Cyril of Jerusalem, Cy- 
prian, and their contemporaries, brought in " another 
Gospel," and that their lives were devoted to the 
propagation of a mischievous development. 

Thirdly, it follows that what converted the Roman 
Empire and worked a new life into the heart of the 
old world, was not real primitive Christianity, but a 
sham and fraudulent travesty thereof, a strange 
hybrid of sacramental, liturgical, and Episcopal er- 
rors, than which nothing could have been more for- 
eign to the mind of the Apostles and of Christ. 1 

Fourthly, it follows that, for some fifteen hundred 
years, Christianity did, as it were, vanish from the 
earth, not to reappear till the sixteenth century, 
when it was born again in Germany and Switzer- 
land, with an ex-monk and a French layman for its 
midwives. 

Fifthly, it follows, Christianity which thus shortly 
after its first appearance deteriorated into an un- 
spiritual, superstitious, ecclesiastical formalism, did, 
on its reappearance in pristine purity, bring forth 

1 The argument is presented with great force and clearness 
by the Rev. Arthur Wilde Little, in his recently published 
work, Reasons for Being a Churchman. Milwaukee, Wis. 
1885. (See chapters xi. and xii.) 



108 THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 

within twenty years such fruit of lawlessness and 
riotous living, of dissensions and strifes, of pride and 
self-will, as terrified and confounded even the Re- 
formers themselves, and led some to doubt greatly 
of what they had done. 

And, finally, the present outcome of this pure, 
revised, restored Christianity is seen in a chaos of 
" denominations," a host of warring sects, which 
can neither teach nor govern, nor maintain* the re- 
spect of mankind. 

These appear to be the logical results of the 
only serious answer to our argument. In its method, 
and in its consequences, the scheme breaks down. 
Its postulate is that the private judgment is man's 
natural and infallible guide, and the test of truth. 
It assumes that the Church is the outcome of her own 
documents. It interprets those documents without 
reference to the witness of the Church as to their 
meaning. Precisely as the " higher criticism " deals 
with the text and sense of the Scriptures, so does 
this spirit deal with questions theological and ecclesi- 
astical. It leads to conclusions of which, I think, 
I may say without objection, that they are most 
acceptable to the rationalist and the infidel. For 
if it be so, that our Holy Religion, as we call it, 
was all but strangled at its birth, and in its resusci- 
tation has fallen to what we see, it would be hard 
indeed to tell what Christianity has done for the 
world. Identify it with Modern Evangelicalism, 
and scarcely can you trace through the last eighteen 



THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. IO9 

centuries that feeble shadow, that bloodless and bone- 
less shape, which never appears to have been able 
to assert its existence, and has proved unequal in 
nearly everything which men demand in a Religion. 

Our position is this : that historic investigation 
only can determine what Christianity is ; and that 
such investigation, honestly and intelligently con- 
ducted, will lead to the conclusion that Christianity 
was a dogmatic, sacramental, sacerdotal, and liturgi- 
cal system from the first. Such a system is before 
us, as soon as we have the full material for the study 
of its character ; and when we read the New Testa- 
ment by the light of that Church in which and for 
which it was written, the system is seen there as 
plainly as in later and uninspired documents. 

Now, as for readjustment. If you can possibly 
do so, readjust modern thought, modern ways, 
and modern society to that old system : but God 
forbid that we should try to adjust it to them. 
Let the thoughts of men be brought into subjection 
to the thought of God ; let man submit to the Au- 
thority which demands his reverence. The world 
needs a new reformation ; a reformation on the old 
lines ; a return to principles, standards, and methods 
which were thrown away three hundred years ago. 
And if, in our own branch of the Church, the popu- 
lar errors which lead, logically and actually, to skep- 
ticism, have foothold, then should she also come in 
for her share in the general purification ; if aught 
in her standards obscure the light, let it be removed ; 



IIO THE EVIL WORK OE PHILOSOPHY. 

if aught hinders her reform on Catholic principles, 
let it be amended, rescinded, expunged. Such is 
the readjustment which these times require. 

And now I ask what likelihood there is that such a 
readjustment can take place ? The answer is fitly 
given in the derision with which the suggestion will 
be received by the liberal thinkers of the day, and even 
by many excellent persons in our own communion. 
Never mind : the true readjustment is certain to 
come at last ; but not soon, nor now. And why 
not now ? Because it must begin with an act of 
submission to authority, which cannot be expected 
at present. And if you ask why not, I will answer 
as briefly as possible, and so make an end for the 
evening. 

Modern Society cannot be readjusted and brought 
in f o harmonious relations with the Ancient Faith, 
because Modern Society will not submit to the 
powers above. It is idle to hope for such submis- 
sion, because Modern Society does not recognize, 
anywhere, a master whom it must obey. The whole 
community, I might say the whole world, England, 
France, Germany, Holland, America, has been grad- 
ually poisoned by a philosophy hostile to the prin- 
ciples of the Christian Religion and containing the 
reversal of Christian processes and habits of thought. 
For some two hundred years has that philosophy 
been taught, by divers masters and under divers 
names; it has permeated everything ; it is become, 
as it were, an atmosphere; it is inhaled unconscious- 



THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. Ill 

\y by man, woman, and child ; it affects men in all 
the relations of life ; it reaches them through history, 
fiction, poetry, art, journalism, science ; it is every- 
where and in every thing ; one might say of it, that 
it darkeneth every man that cometh into this our 
modern world. Now this is the prime and most 
potent agent in the intellectual, moral, and religious 
life of the century ; it colors thought, directs study, 
and determines conclusions. This, really, is the 
spirit which, speaking through good men whom it 
possesses, asks a readjustment of Christianity to the 
very conditions which are the result of its silent work- 
ing and subtle influence. What is this philosophy ? 
Let me explain. 

We are taught by our old teachers that there are 
two distinct spheres, the Rational and the Super-Ra- 
tional, with which we men have to do. All truths be- 
long to one or the other of these orders. Truths of 
the Rational Order are within the sphere of reason ; 
and in dealing with them the reason is in her right, 
and adequate, and sufficient. But there is another 
order, which also contains its truths ; and these are 
above and beyond the reason. That which lies 
within the Rational Order may be discovered and 
proved by reason. But in the higher order that is 
impossible. Truths of that order can never become 
known to the reason by any investigation of its own; 
and if, by any means, the reason should arrive at 
a knowledge of their existence, she can but receive 
them ; she cannot demonstrate them, in the strict 



112 THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 

sense of that word. Powerless to discover, to prove, 
to explain one smallest thing in the Supernatural 
Order, the reason must wait for light to see, and 
when it sees, it must accept. But it is in that Su- 
pernatural Order, and not in the natural, that the 
secret of our life is hidden ; whence we came, what 
we are, why we are, whither we are going, the law 
of duty, the highest good, the solution of doubts, 
the answer to riddles, are there. Unless we know 
those mysteries we cannot live aright ; but we can- 
not know them without a revelation, and an accept- 
ance of the revelation is an act of submission to the 
Power which reveals. The knowledge of super- 
natural truth comes not of investigation, experi- 
ment, argument, or search ; it is made known to man 
by the Incarnate Word of God ; it is preserved from 
loss in that Church which is His Body ; we have 
nothing to do but accept, believe, and walk in that 
light as He is in the light. 1 

Now, the philosophy of the world is precisely the 
reverse of this. It takes its point of departure in 
universal doubt ; it makes the human reason the 
judge of everything; it assumes that the reason, 
starting with the fact of self-consciousness, can dem- 
onstrate, step by step, everything that man needs to 
know. It is not atheistic; it is not irreligious; but 
it would have man depend on himself for his re- 
ligion, his theology, his moral code, and whatever 
he needs over and above his material wants ; nor 
1 S. John xii. 35, 36. 1 John i. 7. 



THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 113 

should he take anything on authority who is the 
supreme authority in himself. This philosophy has 
been lauded as the grandest of all discoveries, the 
most important agent in human progress. Men 
have drunk thereof to the full ; they live of it now ; 
as its disciples they reject the principle of authority 
in religion, and all that hangs thereon ; and those 
who deny the grace of sacraments, the Christian 
priesthood, the Catholic system, the old theology, 
deny them on the principles instilled into them in 
this modern teaching. By degrees men are awaken- 
ing to the consequences of their rejection of the 
principle of authority. The system which begins 
with a claim to discover and demonstrate by logic 
the truths of Natural Religion runs its course after 
its own law, year by year proving less and admitting 
less, till it ends in the schools of skepticism and 
agnosticism, where truth finds its grave. The reason, 
speaking to us through Des Cartes, announces that 
it is able to find out God without God's help. The 
same reason, speaking to us through Des Cartes' 
great-grandchildren, announces that it can find out 
nothing at all, and that there is nothing beyond this 
life which man need trouble himself about. 

That seems to be the secret of the invalid con- 
dition of modern religious thought ; the explanation 
of the doubt and uncertainty, the spiritual darkness, 
the moral confusion and intellectual glaucoma of the 
day. Philosophy, not God, is King. Men are very 
ill ; they know not of what disease ; we can tell 



114 THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 

them. They are suffering from the effects of a slow 
poison ; the whole system appears to be infected 
with the virus. And the only remedy is one which 
we cannot induce them to take. That philosophy 
which has formed modern thought, beginning with 
the assertion of the all-sufficiency and practical om- 
nipotence of the reason, and ending in the denial of 
any sphere or order above the natural and rational ; 
this must be renounced, even as we renounce the 
devil and all his works, the vanity of this world, the 
lust of the flesh. And then we must go back to 
the Christian science, which, preparing the heart for 
God's revelation, teaches that the reason is power- 
less to discover aught in that realm which lies be- 
yond its sphere, and as powerless to demonstrate 
what has been disclosed ; that in the sphere in which 
man's highest happiness, his largest interests, his 
hopes of salvation lie, God is all in all, and God 
only can reveal what he needs to know ; that when 
God speaks, we men have nothing to do but listen 
and be still ; that after He has spoken, we have but 
to order the life after His words ; that man doth not 
live by bread alone, but by those words which pro- 
ceed out of the mouth of God ; that they have been 
spoken to us in these last days by His Son ; and 
that He continues with us, a living present Saviour, 
in that large and luminous mystery, His kingdom, 
I lis Church. 1 

1 Let me call the reader's attention to a sermon by the 
Rev. William G. T. Shedd, D.D., Professor in the Union 



THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY, 115 

" And now, Lord, what is our hope ? Truly our 
hope is even in Thee." We have no hope of a 
speedy reform, greatly as it is needed. It has taken 
two hundred years and more to corrupt society ; it 
may take longer than that to purge the iniquity 
and to cleanse it from its sin. Only by the heavy 
chastening hand of discipline can men be brought 
back to the love of the truth, and to the discern- 
ment of its relation to them in their life. Let that 
be the subject of our earnest prayers, that their eyes 
may be opened, that the truth recovered may make 
them free once more. A restoration of Christian 
theology and* Christian philosophy to their rightful 
place ; a reassertion of lost truth ; a revision of the 
entire conception of truth among those who love 

Theological Seminary, on the Obstacles and Rewards of 
Orthodoxy. A. D. F. Randolph & Co., New York. 

" Pope Leo XIII., in his recent encyclical, perceives this 
truth and acts upon it. In reference to the defence of Chris- 
tianity against the strenuous attack now being made upon it, 
he advises and urges his clergy to study Thomas Aquinas. 
No wiser advice has emanated from the Vatican for a long 
time. Protestant theologians of all denominations will agree 
cordially with the Roman Pontiff upon this point. No more 
powerful reasoning against atheism and materialism, no 
stronger defence of the principles of ethics and natural re- 
ligion, can be found than that of the 'angelic , doctor. And 
in respect to the doctrines of revealed religion, the enuncia- 
tion and support which they have obtained in the Summa 
Theologica make this treatise one of the bulwarks of the 
faith. What is distinctively Papal and Roman will not, of 
course, command the judgment of the Protestant ; but this 



Il6 THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 

and seek it ; a readjustment of views as to the func- 
tion of the reason, the powers and responsibilities of 
private judgment, the limits to speculation; these 
are what the world needs to-day. It is to be feared 
that men can be brought back to their senses only 
by some very painful and bitter road of sorrow. 
When those adversaries which have first wrought 
destruction in the Church, amid the plaudits of the 
infidel, proceed to assail with the very same methods 
and a pitiless logic the social order and every exist- 
ing institution, then at last may men admit their 
mistake, and search once more with great desire for 
those old landmarks which the Fathers set, and for 
those principles on which depend alike our peace 



constitutes only a fraction of the sum total. The strength 
and energy, the acumen and industry, the absorption and 
devoutness of a mind resembling and equal to that of Aris- 
totle — who in the school of Plato got the name of the Intel- 
lect — all this fine flowering and fruitage of the rarest human 
intelligence was consecrated, life-long, in scholastic seclusion, 
and monastic abstinence, to the examination and defence 
of the essential elements of the Christian faith. The traveller 
from Rome to Naples sees from the railway, on the heights 
above Rocca Sccca, the monastery where this ethereal spirit 
obtained some of his education, and did some of his work. 
The scene and the scenery are sympathetic and suggestive. 
The sharp line of the black mountain against the dazzling 
sky, with not a tree or a shrub to interfere between the earth 
and the infinite abyss of heaven, is emblematic of that keen 
and accurate vision that penetrates like a microscope, and 
that unyielding grasp that never lets anything slip." 



THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. \\J 

and security in this world, and our everlasting hap- 
piness in the world to come. 

But surely that would be a notable conversion : 
would God we might live to see it ! It would be 
like the coming of the glorious consummation, the 
dawn of the millennial age, the brightening of 
another day-spring from on high. Who shall be- 
hold such wonders ? What change must be wrought 
in these men about us, ere they can know the things 
that belong to their peace ? 

I believe there are, this hour, among us, persons 
so infatuated by modern errors, and so wedded to 
the idols of their own hearts, that they would rather 
give up religion and relapse into total indifference 
and general scepticism than come humbly back to 
the old Catholic and Apostolic Faith. Whatever 
they may or may not admit, that system, at least, 
dogmatic, sacramental, mystic, cannot, and must not, 
and shall not be true ; they will have none of it ; 
they would rather be without God in this world 
than seek Him in a Sacrament, adore Him on an 
altar, or ask His absolution and blessing through a 
priest. That is the force against us ; the piled-up, 
ponderous, impregnable weight of prejudice wherein 
men have hardened their hearts all the life long. 
But there are signs that in another generation we 
may see a happier state of things. Many are soft- 
ening ; they are willing to listen ; they are patient 
under criticism ; there are marks here and there of 
a disposition to surrender to Christ and the Church. 



Il8 THE EVIL WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 

There is less talk of internal, and more of external, 
evidences ; there is much to cheer ; there will be 
more and more, if only some strong body will keep 
perpetually telling the truth, and holding up the 
light to them that long for it. Let me ask your 
prayers that the Lord will stand by and uphold 
those who represent in this generation the un- 
changing and unchangeable Gospel ; that He will 
not give them over into the hand of the enemy, 
but save them and give them grace and favor in 
the sight of all the people, and through them He 
will set up a standard against the downward drift 
of the spirit of this Time. 






Gbe (Question at toue between tfoe 
(Bospel ant) jpbtlosopbp. 



LECTURE VI. 

THE QUESTION AT ISSUE BETWEEN THE 
GOSPEL AND PHILOSOPHY. 

u Not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demon- 
stration of the Spirit, and of power : that your faith should 
not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." — 
i Corinthians ii. 4, 5. 

This evening I bring these Conferences to a 
close. In doing so I shall ask your careful attention 
to what appears to be the issue between the Mind 
of the Church and the spirit of this age. I do not 
hesitate to call it an issue of life or death. If it 
were possible for the gates of hell to prevail against 
the Church, 1 the credit of that horrible victory might 
properly be awarded, in the council-chamber of the 
nether realm, to those lying spirits 2 who had suc- 
ceeded in persuading men to reject the revelation 
made to them by God their Saviour, and to take as 
a substitute for it the inventions and conclusions of 
their own thoughts. In dealing with this subject I 
shall go over once more some of the ground already 
traversed ; yet it may be better to do so, that the 
points may be more deeply fixed in your minds. 

1 S. Matt. xvi. 18. 2 1 Kings xxii. 22, 23. 

6 



122 THE QUESTION AT ISSUE BETWEEN 

I am sure that there are in this community, and 
through this whole country, thousands and tens of 
thousands of hearts in which the strongest motive is 
the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the desire 
that His redeeming and saving power might be 
made known to all men. The love of Christ con- 
straineth his servants, in many denominations and 
under divers names. Now to such we would affec- 
tionately appeal and say, that we think that they 
ought, by rights, to be on the side of us who stand 
up for dogmatic and doctrinal Christianity, because, 
as I have said already, it is only by the use of dog- 
matic terms and doctrinal statements that the Jesus 
whom they love can be made known to the world 
as true and very Christ, the Redeemer and Saviour 
of men. They see at once the gross inconsistency of 
those persons who claim to know and reverence the 
Lord, while hesitating to admit His Eternal Power 
and Godhead ; they ought to see this no less clearly, 
that it is impossible to confess that Eternal Power 
and Godhead, except in terms apt to express pre- 
cisely what is meant. Christ, to be realized as Re- 
deemer, Saviour, and Lord, must stand out so dis- 
tinctly before us that we cannot ourselves doubt 
who it is, nor be at a loss for words to tell our 
brethren. But those words cannot be the obscure, 
labored, and unintelligible utterances of mysticism 
and metaphysics ; they must be the terse and prac- 
tical speech of the Creed. Now, that is dogma; for 
dogma is exact statement made by competent au- 



THE GOSPEL AND PHILOSOPHY. 123 

thority. And be sure, ye that love the Lord Jesus 
Christ and are jealous of His honor, that the first 
condition to bringing men to Him is this, that His 
witnesses shall be able to tell out His Name, His Na- 
ture, His Work, and His Offices, in language which 
the unbeliever cannot pervert to the concealment of 
his scepticism, and which the humble souls, the 
wayfaring men, and even the children in the congre- 
gation, cannot misunderstand. 

Furthermore, I would ask these lovers of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, whom also we love, whether they can- 
not recognize, in that strong dislike of positive dog- 
matic teaching, so characteristic of our day, which 
enfeebles the Church and checks the progress of our 
religion, a symptom of a malady of human nature ? 
Comes it not of constant reference to self, of reliance 
on our mental processes, our inner experience, and 
our private judgment on religious themes ? And 
do they not know that this mental condition has 
been wrought in so many of us by the assiduous and 
indefatigable teachers of a doctrine directly opposed 
to Christian philosophy and Christian theology? 
This brings me to the subject for this evening. I 
have spoken to you already of that insidious phil- 
osophy which, though professing respect for the Gos- 
pel, ends in leaving us not one of its vital truths. I 
wish to trace the working of that principle more fully 
than I have done hitherto, and to endeavor to make 
you see that we are not without cause for our com- 
plaint, that the ground of the rejection of the Church 



124 THE QUESTION AT ISSUE BETWEEN 

System and Church Principles is substantially a suf- 
ficient ground for the rejection of Christianity itself. 
To treat this subject scientifically is far from my 
intention. To consider the delusive and untenable 
arguments of the pantheistic school about God, as 
the absolute Idea or absolute Spirit, which in eternal 
self-movement proceeds from itself and becomes nat- 
ure, and then again reverting to itself becomes a 
self-conscious spirit, or the immanence of God, or 
the impossibility of conceiving of the existence of a 
personal God, because personality implies finite rela- 
tion ; to take up for discussion any of these topics 
would be out of place here. My aim is to put before 
you, as plainly as possible, the simple, practical out- 
come of it, in hope to show the true and direct rela- 
tion between this "lying spirit" and the popular 
temper on religious questions. Now the difference 
between philosophy and the Gospel is this, that the 
former considers religion to be a something evolved 
from man himself, while the latter brings it to him 
complete, from outside, and presents it for his ac- 
ceptance or rejection. The familiar terms, objec- 
tive and subjective, are perhaps the best we can use 
in saying what we have to say on this theme. That 
is objective to me which is outside of me ; that is 
subjective which is within. The subjective is my 
own creation, through the active thought, the imag- 
ination, and the desires. The objective is not my- 
self ; it exists apart ; it addresses me as one whom I 
meet as I walk along. A subjective Christ is a ere- 



THE GOSPEL AND PHILOSOPHY. 125 

ation of my thought, a phantom in my spirit, such 
as my own notions and opinions may bring Him up 
from the well of my consciousness ; and whatever 
homage I may render to this shadow is, in fact, ren- 
dered to myself. An objective Christ is one who 
comes to me from without, who accosts me on my 
journey, who tells me what and who He is, and 
claims my obedience and my love; and if I yield to 
the claim, I do so on my knees, renouncing my own 
wisdom and worth, and confessing that He is all and 
I am nothing. Now, philosophy says of religion 
that it is evolved from our own thoughts. But what 
the philosophers say about religion in general, other 
persons, who are not philosophers, and perhaps never 
heard the names of the philosophers, are all the while 
saying of religion in particular, and particularly when- 
ever a direct issue is made between reliance on self 
and submission to external authority. If there be 
anything in the institutions, the symbols, the docu- 
ments, or the offices of the Church which seems to 
irritate the spirit of independence, these good and 
well-meaning persons immediately take the opposi- 
tion benches, and talk exactly like the philosophers; 
and philosophy has no more efficient implement in 
spreading its anti-Christian idea, no more helpful 
ally in its war against the Gospel and the Saviour, 
than the man who dislikes doctrine and dogma, and 
dreams of a Christianity without divinely-ordained 
institutions, and without the right to impose a Creed 
on thinking and reasonable men. 



126 THE QUESTION AT ISSUE BETWEEN 

The Gospel is, first of all, objective to us. It did 
not originate in man ; it was not a development of 
his cogitations, nor an outcome of his religious aspira- 
tions. It represents, and realizes to us, things that 
were done by Almighty God first, before they were 
applied to us ; things done for man, which he could 
not have done for himself ; things exhibited to man, 
as medicine to the patient by his physician. And 
this principle runs through the Gospel system from 
beginning to end ; it may be traced in every direc- 
tion ; in the Object of Worship, in the means taken 
to reconcile the world unto Himself ; in the dictation 
of the sacred oracles ; in the constitution of the 
Church ; in the commission of the Ministry ; in the 
presentation of the dogmas of religion ; in the insti- 
tution of the Sacraments ; and especially in the 
Atonement on the Cross, which is the key to all 
mysteries and the centre of the hope of the world. 
Man is treated, under the Gospel, as the subject to 
be reached ; he is sought out by the Lord ; he is 
redeemed by a stupendous action in which he takes 
no part, save as an ensanguined and blinded looker- 
on ; for him is organized a vast institutional Sys- 
tem, with which he is invited to connect himself; 
once in that system he sees ever before him the sym- 
bols of a grace offered to his soul, and effectual signs 
of a power not his, to supplement his feebleness, and 
to repair, renew, and stablish him in a supernatural 
life. All this is outside ; the benefits and effects are 
to be wrought within ; but there shall be no mistak- 



THE GOSPEL AND PHILOSOPHY, \2J 

ing the moral, the hidden meaning of the system. 
He has the choice, to accept or to reject. If he re- 
ject, it is, actually, to turn away from God ; and the 
man who turns from God can turn nowhither ex- 
cepting back into himself ; and that is loss eternal. 
" He shall turn again to his earth, and then all his 
thoughts perish." From first to last the choice for 
us is between the Objective and the Subjective, be- 
tween the King, to Whom all live who believe in 
Him, and Self, which cannot do for anyone what 
has been done and can be done by God alone. The 
Gospel gives the objective, Philosophy the sub- 
jective. The latter shall perish in the using, since 
it is the work of man ; the former shall never fail, 
for it is the Word of our God, which endureth for- 
ever. 

To illustrate and apply what I am saying, let me 
begin with the doctrine of the Atonement, as that 
which most tenderly and pathetically touches the 
hearts of men. The Gospel teaching on that point 
is objective first, and subjective afterward. We are 
told that the Death of Christ accomplished some- 
thing for us men, before it was made known to us 
as an object of faith, that it did something even for 
those who never heard of Christ, and never in this 
world should learn His name. He offered a sacrifice 
for sin first. With that men had nothing to do; 
it was what neither man nor angel could have done. 
That comes first : the Sacrifice of the Death of 
Christ ; an action done before the whole Universe, 



128 THE QUESTION AT ISSUE BETWEEN 

and for the benefit of all mankind, in the open air, 
under God's heaven, and in the view of mortals, 
devils, and angels. When that act had been accom- 
plished, men were told the mystery, and they were 
bidden to draw near and look upon the Lamb of 
God Who taketh away the sin of the world. The 
subjective impression made on the heart is an after 
thing, a sequel ; it follows on faith in that outside 
and completed work. 

Now, see how philosophy deals with that vital 
truth. I say philosophy, for I would rather charge 
the error upon it than upon persons who love the 
Lord Jesus Christ ; if among such there be those 
who find that they think the same way, let them 
settle it between philosophy and themselves, and 
judge how much in them is to be credited to phi- 
losophy and how much to religion. Look, then, how 
philosophy deals with that vital truth, how it takes 
hold of it and perverts it ; mark exactly what it 
does. It cancels all that is objective. It denies the 
fact that an atonement, a satisfaction, was made. It 
may very easily laud the power of the Cross, as it 
would commend the calmness of Socrates, or the 
unselfishness of Regulus; but, according to philos- 
ophy, the only power of the Cross is to work on 
human feelings, and so to influence life and character. 
( Jhrist in 1 lis death had no object, so far as we are 
cerned, but to awaken our admiration, pity, and 
sympathy, and so draw our hearts to His; and the 
Cross is not to be regarded as an altar, on which a 



THE GOSPEL AND PHILOSOPHY. 129 

sacrifice of reparation and satisfaction is made to 
the Father Eternal, but rather a beautiful and divine 
poem of humility, unselfishness, love, and devotion 
to men. The objective side of the Atonement van- 
ishes ; the subjective remains and nothing else. And 
if this one-sided philosophic notion could gain uni- 
versal credence, as undoubtedly it would if not 
incessantly checked by the powerful dogmatic teach- 
ing of the Holy Catholic Church, the result would 
be that Christ the Redeemer would be lost ; no 
longer would remain the sense of the " exceeding 
sinfulness of sin," nor meaning in the words, 

*' Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 
Let me hide myself in Thee ; 
Let the water and the blood, 
From Thy side, a healing flood, 
Be of sin the double cure, 
Save from wrath, and make me pure." 

The Christ then left to us would be no more than 
a kind and lovely man, the sort of person to be very 
popular in cultured rationalistic circles, over whom 
philanthropists might gush, and from whom all that 
is mysterious and superstitious w T ould have been 
quite purged out and taken away. 

On this first point I hope we are in accord ; I wish 
we could agree as well all through : but whether it be 
be so or not, I think the principle is as clear in each 
other instance which 1 shall cite as in this. For our 
second illustration, then, take the Church. As de- 
scribed in Holy Scripture, it is an organization, an 
6* 



I30 THE QUESTION AT ISSUE BETWEEN 

institution, a Kingdom, founded on a rock, having a 
door with keys, and persons in charge of those keys, 
and having a promise of perpetuity. The Church 
of the Old and New Testaments, and of history, is a 
visible state, with Ministry, ordinances, and laws. 
This is certainly its objective presentation. It is not 
men who found and make the Church ; it is Christ 
who founds the Church and calls men into it ; who, 
there, teaches them their lessons, sets them their 
tasks, and binds them by canonical and ecclesiastical 
regulations. The Church is outside of us and of 
our life ; it receives us into itself ; it proposes to 
limit our thoughts by its dogmatic teaching, and 
to guide our feet through this world by its precepts; 
it is a mighty Community, holding angels and living 
saints and dead together ; and, as matter of fact, the 
greater part of it, now after almost two thousand years, 
is in that other world beyond the river, which our feet 
in time must cross. That is the Gospel presentation 
of the Church, strictly objective, to begin with. 
But now, again, mark what philosophy does. ' It re- 
jects this objective idea of the Church, and insists on a 
subjective view. There are degrees in its departure 
from the truth. There are philosophical religionists, 
and they are many in number, who deny to the 
Church the note of visibility; it is, say they, an in- 
visible Church, it consists of truly converted and 
holy souls, scattered all through the different relig- 
ious denominations, and known only to God. There 
are others who say that the Church was originally a 



THE GOSPEL AND PHILOSOPHY. 131 

mere aggregation of religious enthusiasts, a kind of 
sacred and inspired mob of persons under convic- 
tion ; that they stood together at first lovingly, but 
loosely, without distinction or difference, without 
organization, without commissioned leaders, without 
a government, in short, that they were a band of 
enthusiastic communists : and further, it is alleged 
that the first move toward organization came about 
through the work of distributing alms, that the 
almoners expanded into ecclesiastical officers, and 
that by natural development there came into being 
the Church of a later age, with its hierarchy, its rites, 
and its councils. Next come others, more bold, 
who say that the Church is neither visible, nor 
organized, nor an aggregation of souls known or un- 
known, seen or unseen, but that the word " Church " 
is merely another expression for the religious state of 
the human mind in general, the continuous thought 
of Christian men from age to age. Such a come- 
down as this is something of which the Dominie in 
the romance might well have said, " Prodigious ! " 
and yet, is it not the inevitable outcome of rejecting 
the objective side of the revelation on that point ? 

Or, take the Ministry. Such writers as S. Paul 
and S. Chrysostom, following the teaching as it 
came to them direct or by tradition ; such authors 
as they who composed the Ordinal in the Book of 
Common Prayer, proceed in the full assurance of 
the fact that the essence of the Ministry consists 
in a call from God, and " that no man taketh that 



132 THE QUESTION AT ISSUE BETWEEN 

honor unto himself, but he that is called of God, 
as was Aaron." 1 Now, Aaron certainly had an ob- 
jective call, and an external investiture and commis- 
sion. " As was Aaron," then, so is the man who 
now ministers in the Church ; not self-made, but 
sent. The Ministry has been conferred from age 
to age by Apostolic Succession : it can be had in 
no other way. The Christian Priesthood, commis- 
sioned by the Lord, or those to whom he has dele- 
gated the power of ordination, stand before the 
people with gifts which the people did not confer ; 
they are stewards of the mysteries of Christ, they 
are entrusted with divine things ; the people may 
hear or forbear as they like : the Priesthood is God's 
Institution, whatever the people may think or do. 
This is the objective side as to the doctrine of the 
Holy Ministry. But here, as always, philosophy 
plays us its old tricks : First, it denies the teaching 
of the Church concerning Episcopacy and the Apos- 
tolic Succession, so opening the door to all minis- 
tries; and then it goes further, and claims that no 
call whatever is needed, that anyone who chooses is 
free to style himself a minister, and that the test 
of the call is within, and not without ; it is simply 
a subjective thing ; there is no need to possess and 
show a commission, duly sealed, signed, and attested ; 
it suffices that one is likely to be successful in the 
work which he is expected to do who writes " Rev- 
erend " before his name. 

1 Hebrews v. 4. 






THE GOSPEL AND PHILOSOPHY. 1 33 

I take another illustration in the doctrine of the 
Sacraments. The statements have been made 
before ; but they will bear repetition. We under- 
stand them to be signs effectual, signifying divine 
forces, and conferring what they signify. That is 
the objective view. Baptism is " the laver of re- 
generation ; " God meets man there, and does some- 
thing for him which he cannot do for himself. It 
is an outward gift — that is to say, a gift coming from 
outside the periphery of terrestrial things ; techni- 
cally we call it sacramental. But the philosophic 
religionist says, No. Baptism is a sign and nothing 
more. Instrumentally it effects nothing. Regen- 
eration and conversion are the same thing ; and these 
are effected subjectively in the soul, without inter- 
vention of man or rite ; and baptism is a kind of 
notification, either of the hope that the child bap- 
tized will at some future time become regenerate, 
or of the belief that the person baptized has already 
been regenerated ; but baptism in itself can do 
nothing for us, being either a sign to lookers-on, or 
a seal to the individual receiving it. What wonder 
that under this purely subjective teaching adult 
baptism should have been neglected, and infant 
baptism abandoned ? What wonder that, although, 
as is well known, our Lord declared, " Except a 
man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot 
enter into the kingdom of God," l we should hear 
the insolent paraphrase of an apostle's words, 
1 S. John iii. 5. 



134 THE QUESTION AT ISSUE BETWEEN 

" Baptism is nothing, and the want of baptism is 
nothing, but the keeping the commandments of 
God ! " x 

When we come to the Holy Communion the 
same mischievous work is conspicuous. For the 
Church teaches us that the Holy Sacrament of the 
Altar is, in itself, complete. Christ is spiritually 
present, by the words of institution and the power 
of the Holy Ghost ; and man draws near to that 
awful mystery, to receive, if duly prepared, "the 
strengthening and refreshing of the soul ; " or, if un- 
worthy, " to eat and to drink unto himself damna- 
tion," as one who profaneth the most sacred thing of 
the Kingdom. 

u Tantum ergo sacramentum 

Veneremur cernui, 
Et antiquum testamentum 

Cedat novo ritui ; 
Fides praestat supplementum 

Sensuum defectui." 

But here it is that philosophy fairly riots in expe- 
dients to get rid of the objective side of this mys- 
tery, and to limit our belief to the subjective. It 
denies, flatly and always, the Real, Objective Pres- 
ence of the Lord in that Holy Mystery ; it invents 
the theory of the Virtual Presence, of the Repre- 
sentative Presence, of the Symbolical Presence; it 

1 I have heard with my own ears this blasphemous parody 
of i Cor. vii. 19. 






THE GOSPEL AND PHILOSOPHY. 1 35 

descends, at last, to the Memorial theory ; and it in- 
sists that the only value in the " Communion " is 
its effect on the mind or heart, and that the only 
Presence of Christ is in the human heart. 

I think this series of illustrations could be car- 
ried on until it had taken every particular in the sys- 
tem of Christianity. Where a false principle has 
been injected at the source, it corrupts, of necessity, 
every stream that issues from that head. From the 
doctrine of the Atonement to that of the Ministry, 
from the doctrine of the Ministry to that of the Sac- 
raments, and thence, on and on in everything, the 
error may be traced ; and its essence is the sacrifice 
of the Objective to the Subjective in every religious 
conception. And when you comprehend this, you 
will understand precisely what has been done by 
the rationalistic philosophy to which I am now 
referring, and may agree with us who lay at its 
door the popular dislike of dogmatic instruction, the 
incredulity of many on the subject of miracles, the 
rejection of the supernatural, the over-estimate of 
preaching and the under-estimate of worship, the re- 
liance on sensations, the acceptableness of any nov- 
elty, the disgust for severe discipline, the idolatry of 
what are called broad and liberal teachers, in a word, 
the entire outcome of the concentration of thought 
on self. 

Now, what you should well understand is this, 
that there are two systems before you ; and that to 
hold either efficiently you must hold it thoroughly ; 



136 THE QUESTION AT ISSUE BETWEEN 

and that if you do not hold to the one so intelli- 
gently and so lovingly as to keep yourself from co- 
quetting with the other, you will end in losing the 
one to which you are untrue. If you take the phil- 
osophical theory of subjectivism in any of its parts, 
you risk being drawn into it as a whole ; touch the 
outer edge of the Maelstrom and the terrible pull 
toward the centre begins. It may seem a light thing 
to some one to deny the Real Presence, and regen- 
eration in Baptism, and the Apostolic Succession ; 
but the grounds on which these are rejected will be 
found to be in kind the very same on which the 
Sacrifice on the Cross is denied by the Unitarian, 
and the whole system of Christianity rejected by the 
free-thinker. The process is one ; it is that of meas- 
uring the dogmatic teaching of the Catholic Church 
by one's private rule and standard, and applying to 
God's mysteries the moral and intellectual habits of 
the time. The Rule of Faith is Holy Scripture, as 
interpreted by common Catholic consent ; substitute 
for that the speculative wisdom of your learned men, 
or the sentiment of the age, or any other test that 
may be named, as likely to be acceptable to this 
generation, and for you the entire system of Christi- 
anity is in peril. You may begin with some pre- 
ludes, which it might be easy to overlook and ex- 
cuse ; but there is nothing except the grace and 
mercy of God that can save you from going on to a 
denial of the Church which is His Body, and of that 
atoning sacrifice once offered by Him, in His utter 



THE GOSPEL AND PHILOSOPHY. 1 37 

and absolute solitude, when as our High Priest, 
unaided and alone, He took away the sin of the 
world. 

I give no name to that philosophy of which I have 
been speaking ; I care not what title, ancient or mod- 
ern, it may bear, whether it be commended to us 
with the autograph of a Hegel or a Schleiermacher, 
or any other man. What I say is this : that it is 
man's device and invention, that it is another gospel, 
and that our duty is to sound the note of warning 
against it. Nor can it hold its ground : fail it must, 
and fail it ought to ; for it cuts the ground from un- 
der our feet, it gives us nothing better to feed on 
than the varying opinions of a learned few, clever 
and cultured, no doubt, but independent in specula- 
tion and restive under any restraint ; and when it 
tries to speak, its language is so strange, so affected, 
so incomprehensible, that no simple-minded man 
could possibly get at what it means. We need an 
education in the vocabulary of metaphysics to fathom 
the statements of these teachers ; and for one, I had 
rather be trained in the simple old-fashioned speech 
of the Bible and the Prayer Book ; I know what 
that means, I can understand it ; it is what I want, 
to walk by in this perplexing life, to hold to in the 
dying hour. I find it not in the philosophic jargon 
of the School which boasts so loudly all the day, 
but in Him who stands outside of me, to whom I 
look up out of the deep of this sinful world, and out 
of my own darkness, from whom alone I have light, 



1 38 THE Q UESTION A T ISSUE BETWEEN 

as " seeing Him who is invisible," ' as feeling certain 
that " I know whom I have believed." 2 

And let me add one thing more. There is, thank 
God, a widespread desire for unity among Chris- 
tians. It is growing stronger day by day. It is no 
surprise to those who are aware that now for many, 
many years the members of a great organization ex- 
tending throughout the Christian world have been 
praying every day, in the self-same words, that our 
Lord will grant to His Church that peace and unity 
which are according to His will. This is one of the 
most hopeful signs of the time ; the clear dawning 
of the day when the flocks shall be gathered to- 
gether 3 in one fold, under one shepherd, and at even- 
ing time there shall be light. 4 But, in the name of 
whatever is reasonable and right, let us make no 
blunder here, lest the work come to naught for the 
present, and the hope be still longer deferred. No 
union would be real but a union on principle and in 
truth ; on the principles of the Gospel, and in the 
truth of the Catholic Religion. Other unions have 
been tried : they are but mockeries of union ; when 
men come together, by way of surrender of the 
truth, their unions will not endure; the cord is but 
a rope of sand. No union can be real, none perma- 
nent, but one formed on the firm platform of dog- 
matic truth. Philosophy can but mock us with the 
promise ; it cannot bring aught to fulfilment. Phi- 

1 Hebrews xi. 27. 2 Tim. i. 12. 

3 Genesis xxix. 8. * Zech. xiv. 7. 



THE GOSPEL AND PHILOSOPHY, 1 39 

losophy means adjustment, adaptation, change ; it is 
of man, not of God. The " liberal," as he calls him- 
self, will only end in throwing things into greater 
confusion ; the broad-churchman, breaking down the 
dykes, will end in bringing in the flood of waters, 
washing every standing thing away. There can be 
no Millennium till there be a reunion of Christen- 
dom ; and there can be no true, healthful, and per- 
manent reunion of Christendom till men " all speak 
the same thing, and till there be no division among 
them, and till they be perfectly joined together in 
the same mind and in the same judgment." How, 
I ask, is that possible, except on the basis of a Faith, 
a Creed, and an organized Church ? 

What the nation wants is a common faith and a 
common rule of morals. That Church will rule the 
religious part of the nation which tells it most 
plainly what to believe, what to do, and how to live. 
We have had eminent apostles of liberalism among 
us : they have proved failures ; their lecture-rooms 
are closed, their audiences are dispersed. We have 
philosophico-religionists among us now who, obvi- 
ously, prefer modern German literature to the old 
Catholic theology ; their work also will fail, and 
their short-lived honor will die away. 1 Our Church 

1 The recent appearance of a form of Hegelianism in our 
Church may be regarded rather as a curious phenomenon 
than as a matter of serious moment. The Hegelian doctrine 
of the immanence of God in the world and the human soul, 
according to which the relation of the divine and human 



140 THE QUESTION AT ISSUE BETWEEN 

is attracting more and more attention day by day. 
She has remarkable advantages for the work of pre- 
senting to people who still love simplicity and sin- 
cerity a definite view of our Holy Redeemer and a 
practical application of the doctrines of grace. But O ! 
the greatness of this responsibility ! and O ! the sin, 
the crime, of corrupting the Evangelical doctrines 
with fhe rudiments of the world ! If we should fail ; 
if we should repeat the miserable history of the Ger- 
man rationalists, the Tubingen school, the English 
Agnosticism, if we dally, and lose time, and throw 

spirit is conceived as essential unity and not as personal dis- 
tinction and intercourse, leads on to the position of Baur 
and the Tubingen school, who reject the supernatural and 
miraculous in the Scriptures and the Church, and leave no 
place in history or religion for a Personal God. The total 
rejection of Christianity, as we have received it by tradition 
from our fathers, is an easy thing for one who has swallowed 
the Hegelian philosophy. We deem it impossible that those 
errors should obtain a permanent footing among us, in view 
of the insurmountable obstacles to their propagation by the 
dogmatic, sacramental, and liturgical defences in our Church 
system ; these it should be our constant aim to strengthen 
and defend. There arc weeds which flourish only where the 
ground is poor ; and as everyone knows who has tried to 
make a handsome lawn, the sure way is to keep enriching 
the soil. Good grass-seed and plenty of it saves the trouble 
of pulling up the sprawling plantain and the pert white daisy. 
So with the Church ; the soil is too full of the germs of truth, 
the sod too firm, to give much encouragement to unwhole- 
some vegetation ; the fittest will survive ; and the fittest is 
decidedly not German metaphysics. 



THE GOSPEL AND PHILOSOPHY. 141 

away the truth in the attempt to dress it up to the 
taste of vitiated appetites and diseased palates,^there 
are, there must be, those in this land who shall still 
speak God's unchanging truth and declare the unal- 
terable principles of the Catholic system when our 
stammering lips are dumb. The Church of the fut- 
ure will not be a school of philosophy, nor an au- 
dience-room for oratory, nor a museum of science, 
nor an assembly of self-satisfied rationalists, but an 
organized Kingdom in which shall be the Presence 
of the Sovereign, the riches of the treasure-house of 
grace, and the jewels of the crown. King OF Kings 
and Lord of Lords, blessed be Thy Kingdom, 
which is an everlasting Kingdom, and Thy Domin- 
ion which endureth from generation to generation ! 



Supplement— TUnfoersitp Sermon, 
Zbc jfull assurance of ifaitb. 



NOTICE. 

The following sermon was preached in S. Augustine's 
Chapel, Sewanee, Tenn., at the Annual Commencement 
of the University of the South, on Sunday, August 2, 1885. 
It is annexed, as a supplement, with the intention of throw- 
ing light on some of the statements in Lectures II. and V., 
and of showing their practical application in the order of 
our salvation. 



SERMON. 

THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 

61 Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the 
holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which 
He hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, 
His flesh ; and having an High Priest over the house of God ; 
let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, 
having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our 
bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the profes- 
sion of our faith without wavering." — Hebrews x. 19-23. 

The kind invitation which brings me here to-day 
is one of those which inevitably embarrass the re- 
cipient. No audience could more fully awaken the 
sense of responsibility than the one before me ; and 
yet the time is too short to do justice to any great 
theme on which one might desire to speak for spir- 
itual counsel or systematic instruction. What more 
can the preacher do, than to say some words which, 
haply, may be as seed sown for a reaping in after 
years ? 

I come to this beautiful place from very differ- 
ent scenes, and am refreshed in the atmosphere of 
intellectual culture and evangelical religion. Many 
of you are soon to bid these hills and valleys a long 
7 



146 THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 

farewell and go out into a turbulent and noisy world 
which lieth in wickedness. Tempters are there ; the 
highways are dangerous. You will need a good con- 
science, a strong heart, and a ready mind to do such 
things as are right. These come of the grace of 
God ; and that is a gift to faith : for " by grace ye 
are saved through faith." 1 Now, among the enemies 
who wait for you outside, those are most to be 
dreaded who rob men of their faith. Many a youth, 
on passing from a home like this, and drifting into 
the vortex of the secular order, has repeated the story 
of the parable, in falling among thieves, who have 
stripped him of his raiment of religion, and wounded 
him, and departed, leaving him half dead. 2 Fain 
would I speak words which may fortify you against 
the perils of that way. 

I have taken a long text, full of Christian doc- 
trine, not to expound it, but simply for the sake of 
three or four words there: "boldness" — "full as- 
surance of faith" Mysteries are here, crowded to- 
gether. " The Holiest ; " that is, the unseen world. 
" The blood of Jesus;" that is, Atonement for sin. 
" The veil, His Flesh," the Incarnation; "an High 
Priest," the sacerdotal function ; " the House of 
God," the visible Church; "washing with pure wa- 
ter," the " one baptism for the remission of sins." 
Here, indeed, be mysteries, deep and dense. Yet in 
the midst of them the writer walks, not dubious and 
perplexed, but with " boldness " and in " full assur- 

1 Ephes. ii. 8. 2 S. Luke x. 30. 



THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 147 

ance of faith." I bid you hail with joy his cheer- 
ful words. They bespeak a state of mind, a habit 
of soul which are the safeguard of morality and the 
guarantee of inner peace. And they suggest a com- 
parison with another habit of soul, another cast of 
thought, which, in this age of cross-purposes and 
conflicting counsels, we ought to study, just as, in 
the medical colleges, they investigate the causes and 
symptoms of bodily and mental disease. 

Among the things with which man has to do, there 
are some which lie beyond his reach ; he cannot see 
them, nor can he subject them to scientific tests. 
We speak of them, generally, as the truths of Reve- 
lation. The attitude of the mind toward them must 
take the form, either of a question, or of a conclusion, 
or of a positive assertion. And according to the form 
which thought so takes, we come to Scepticism, or 
Rationalism, or Catholic Faith. 

For instance, as to the " life of the world to come." 
The sceptic asks a question : " Is there a future life ? " 
The rationalist arrives at a conclusion : " I infer, on 
such and such grounds, that there must be a future 
life." The Christian believer says, " There IS a fut- 
ure life." Or, take another illustration. The scep- 
tic asks, " Is God love ? " for he finds much in the 
process of the natural world to the contrary. The 
rationalist says, " I think, having weighed the pros 
and cons, that God is love." The Christian says, " I 
know that God is love." How comes it that any 
man can pass out of the lines of questioning and de- 



148 THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 

bating, and affirm boldly, " God is love, and He has 
given to me an immortal soul?" Such assertions 
express " full assurance." But assurance on such 
points can only come by faith. 

For, of course, there is no assurance where there is 
doubt; doubt is the opposite pole, nor does a man 
feel sure while asking questions. Nor yet can as- 
surance, full and final, be the outcome of the process 
of drawing conclusions from premises in the logical 
method; because no man can be perfectly sure of 
his process, and still less can he be sure that he may 
not hear, or learn, or discover something by and by 
which may compel him to revise his argument and 
change his views. Neither in a society of sceptics, 
nor yet in a society of rationalists, can there be 
"assurance." To gain it, a man must have left off 
asking questions ; he must have found some other 
basis than that provided by logic and speculation ; 
he must have got a foothold on some shore where 
all things are calm and unshaken, and where he is 
independent of the variations incessantly exhibited 
in the " vain " thoughts of men. 1 

Now, first, it may be asked, whether such assur- 
ance is to be had ? I answer, yes ; it has been en- 
joyed, it is now enjoyed ; it is the special gift of the 
Gospel, the sign of the children of the Kingdom. 
That is a weak and tepid dilution of Christianity 
which does not give assurance; and when you hear 
Christian teachers or Christian bodies speak with 
1 Psalm \ci\. 1 1 . 



THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 149 

hesitation, and as under correction from the schools 
of the world, know that they must have become 
tinctured by rationalism and weakened by " science 
falsely so called." ' The Gospel came to us in an 
age of doubt, perplexity, and dissolving faiths. The 
marked distinction between the men enlightened by 
the Gospel and those of the philosophical schools 
was that the former knew what they believed, while 
the latter drifted helplessly through the chaos of 
their queries and the dimness of their conclusions. 
The First Age was one of living and burning faith ; 
the proof is on every page of the New Testament. 
" With great power gave the Apostles witness of the 
resurrection of the dead," 2 a thing which the infidel 
derides, and at which the gorge of the rationalist 
rises in the effort to swallow it. " Our word toward 
you was not yea and nay. For all the promises of 
God are yea, and in Him Amen, unto the glory of 
God by us." 3 " I know whom I have believed." * 
Why multiply these quotations ? Let us challenge 
the production of any evidence against our claim, 
that from the highest teacher of the Church down 
to the humblest child in the kingdom, they spoke 
so boldly, and with such magnificent confidence, 
that worldly men, like Felix, thought them beside 
themselves. Assurance was once enjoyed; to say 
that we cannot have it now, that the minister of 
Christ may not now speak with authority, that the 

1 I Tim. vi. 20. 2 Acts iv. 33. 

3 2 Cor. i. 18-20. 4 2 Tim. i. 12. 



ISO THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 

disciple may not feel himself immovably strong in 
his religion, is substantially to insinuate that some 
change has come over the world, under which the 
power of the Gospel has passed away. 

Reflect a moment on the Gospel ; on what it 
proposed to effect, and did effect. Its object is the 
sanctification of men — to make them clean, pure, 
and true, sober, just, and temperate; to transform 
them from glory to glory into the image of God. 
This aim is pursued, not by moral suasion, nor by 
fine talks about ethics, but by the exhibition of 
certain facts which it proposes to faith, and by the 
disclosure of a body of truth which it required men 
to receive simply on this ground, that God hath 
spoken. That truth was not the acquisition of the 
philosophers and the wise of this world ; nor was 
it held in monopoly by any critical or scientific 
clique ; not yet had any such class the right to look 
after it, as if it were particularly in their charge, and 
as if man's continued acceptance of it must depend 
on the way in which it might endure the handling 
of its patrons from time to time. There could have 
been no assurance, no certainty, in a scheme ema- 
nating from the human brain, or subject to revision 
and correction by human wit or wisdom. The 
Gospel was for all people, nations, and languages; 
it knew no difference, and made no distinction, be- 
tween Jew or Greek, bond or free, rich or poor, 
young or old, learned or ignorant. What it offered 
was offered to every intelligent being alike, and to 



THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. I 5 I 

all in the same way and on the same conditions. 
Particularly we know, from the record, that it came 
first, in the fulness of light, knowledge, and grace, 
not to the " wise and prudent," not to the " mighty 
and noble," ' but to " babes," to the simple and the 
weak, to those whom the great of this world de- 
spised ; and that it was never more effective to all 
its purposes than to those who were not of the 
student class, and knew nothing of logic, disputa- 
tion, scientific methods, or the learning of their 
time ; nay, what shut men out of that system, and 
kept them out of it, was intellectual pride and the 
self-sufficiency of irreligious culture. As a fact, the 
Gospel was no discovery or invention of pedagogues 
and professors ; nor could a system with such per- 
sons for its apostles have become a religion for man- 
kind. 

For let us suppose that speculative knowledge, 
critical investigation, and long study had been re- 
quired as conditions to the knowledge of the Truth ; 
three inconveniences would have resulted, over- 
throwing the system from the very starting-point. 2 

1 1 Cor. i. 26. 

2 u Sequerentur tamen tria inconvenientia si hujus Veri- 
tas solummodo rationi inquirenda relinqueretur. 

" Unum est, quod paucis hominibus Dei cognitio inesset. 
A fructu enim studiosae inquisitionis, qui est veritatis inven- 
tio, plurimi impediuntur tribus de causis. 

" Quidam siquidem impediuntur, propter complexionis 
indispositionem, ex qua multi naturaliter sunt indispositi ad 
sciendum. Unde nullo studio ad hoc pertingere possent, ut 



152 THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH 

First, the knowledge of God and of his grace 
would have been limited to a very few individuals. 

Secondly, they who possessed it would have at- 
tained it only after a very long time, and toward 
the close of life. 

Thirdly, even in their case it would have been 
blended with many errors, the result of human im- 
perfection. 

summum gradum humanae cognitionis attingerent, qui in 
cognoscendo Deum consistit. 

" Quidam vero impediuntur necessitate rei familiaris. 
Oportet enim esse, inter homines, aliquos qui temporalibus 
admin istrandis insistant, qui tantum tempus in otio contem- 
plative inquisitionis non possent expendere, ut ad summum 
fastigium humanae inquisitionis pertingerent, scilicet Dei 
cognitionem. 

" Ouidam autem impediuntur pigritia. Ad cognitionem 
enim corum quae de Deo ratio investigare potest, multa prse- 
cognosccrc oportet, quum fere totius philosophiae consider- 
atio ad Dei cognitionem ordinetur. Propter quod meta- 
physica, quae circa divina versatur, inter philosophiae partes 
ultima remanet addiscenda. 

" Sic ergo non nisi cum magno labore studii ad praedictae 
veritatis inquisitionem perveniri potest ; quemquidem labo- 
rem pauci subire volunt pro amore scientiae, cujus tamen 
mentibus hominum naturalem Deus inseruit appetitum. 

11 Secundum inconveniens est, quod illi qui ad praedictae 
veritatis cognitionem vel inventionem pervenerint, vix post 
longum tempus pertingerent, turn propter hujusmodi veri- 
tatis profunclitatcm, ad quam capiendam per viam rationis 
non nisi post longum exercitium intellect us humanus idoneus 
invenitur ; turn etiam propter multa quae praeexiguntur, ut 
dictum est; turn propter hoc quod tempore juventutis dum 



THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 1 53 

First, the knowledge of the truth, if it depended 
on the investigation of the learned, would have been 
limited to a very few of our race. For men in gen- 
eral must always be prevented from acquiring knowl- 

diversis motibus passionum anima fluctuat, non est apta ad 
tarn altae veritatis cognitionem, sed in quiescendo fit prudens 
et sciens ut dicitur in septimo Physicorum (c. 3). Rema- 
neret igitur humanum genus, si sola rationis via ad Deum 
cognoscendum pateret, in maximis ignorantiae tenebris ; 
quum Dei cognitio, quae homines maxime perfectos et bonos 
facit non nisi quibusdam paucis, et his paucis etiam post 
temporis longitudinem, proveniret. 

" Tertium inconveniens est, quod investigationi rationis 
humanae plerumque falsitas admiscetur, propter debilitatem 
intellectus nostri in judicando et phantasmatum permix- 
tionem. Et ideo apud multos in dubitatione remanerent ea, 
quae sunt verissime etiam demonstrata, dum vim demonstra- 
tionis ignorant, et praecipue quum videant a diversis, qui 
sapientes dicuntur, diversa doceri. Inter multa etiam vera, 
quae demonstrantur, immiscetur aliquando aliquid falsum, 
quod non demonstratur, sed aliqua probabili vel sophistica 
ratione asseritur, quae interdum demonstratio reputatur. Et 
ideo oportuit, per viam fidei, fixa certitudine, ipsam verita- 
tem de rebus divinis hominibus exhiberi. 

" Salubriter ergo divina providit dementia, ut ea etiam 
quae ratio investigare potest fide tenenda praeciperet, ut sic 
omnes de facili possent divinae cognitionis participes esse, et 
absque dubitatione et errore. 

i( Hinc est quod dicitur : Jam non a?nbuletis sicut et 
gentes ambulant, in vanitate sensus sui, tenebris obscuratum 
habentes intellectum (Ephes. iv. 17, 18). Et : Ponam uni- 
verses Jilios tuos doctos a Domino (Isai. liv. 13)." — St. 
Thomas : Summa contra Gentiles, Book L, chap. v. 



154 THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 

edge in that slow and laborious way by these three 
causes : 

(a) The greater number have no natural ability 
for scientific study ; so that the ignorant and un- 
learned would have been excluded. 

(b) A still greater number are hindered from such 
study by the cares of life, and the necessity of in- 
cessant labor to maintain themselves and those de- 
pendent on them ; so that the laboring classes, the 
toilers by land and sea, the administrators of trusts 
for others, and all who lack time and leisure for 
reading, investigation, and thought, would have been 
excluded. 

(c) The dread of the painfulness and fatigue of 
such study would have deterred from it, even where 
circumstances were somewhat favorable to the pur- 
suit of the truth in that way. 

So that they who had the ability, the time, and 
the perseverance to discover religious truth by the 
path of the student and the scholar would have 
constituted an infinitesimally small proportion of 
mankind. 

But, secondly, of these, they only who had sur- 
vived many years would have come to the knowl- 
edge of it at last. For art is long and time is short ; 
and the study of such profound mysteries as those 
of religion would demand at least as much time as 
the study of natural science, in pursuing which men 
grow old, gray, and thin, or die, perchance, before 
attaining the desired success. 



THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH 1 55 

And, thirdly, evAi these favored few, unless di- 
vinely protected from the results of human infirmity, 
would not, after all, have attained to perfect knowl- 
edge. In every investigation allowance must be 
made for error ; there are corrections for every ob- 
servation. Who could be absolutely sure that his 
rational process was exactly correct ? His succes- 
sors might possibly discover errors which he had 
overlooked ; the religious knowledge of one era, or 
what passed current for such, might be superseded 
by new philosophical methods, by some later psy- 
chology, or by the scientific discoveries of a succeed- 
ing age. 

Thus, if it had been so ordered that the knowl- 
edge of the truth was to come only by dint of in- 
vestigation and study, and not by revelation, and 
that we were to be indebted to " the wise and pru- 
dent " for it, and must look to them for light, and 
hold our faith subject to their favorable censure, one 
cannot see how, in all the world, there could have 
been " assurance " in the possession of truth, or 
" boldness " in its assertion. The weak, the igno- 
rant, the toilers, and the poor must have remained 
in darkness. A select few, aristocrats of learning, 
Brahmins of science and philosophy, might have 
seemed to know something about religion ; yet 
even these would have been in doubt themselves, 
and the cause of doubt to others ; while the earth 
would have been covered with darkness, through 
which a few lights might have been seen, flaring 



156 THE FULL ASSURANCE OF F ALT II. 

with unsteady flame, and so dim that a mere puff of 
wind might extinguish them forever. 

The process of Rationalism and the spirit of the 
Gospel are essentially antagonistic ; nor could the 
former have done for men what the latter did ac- 
complish ; and the notion that the knowledge of 
religious truth is the result of the independent ex- 
ercise of our natural powers and mental acumen is 
destructive of the possibility of certainty in matters 
of more concern to us than life itself. 

What, then, is that Truth to which men cannot 
attain by the mere exercise of the natural powers, 
which is above human correction and human criti- 
cism, which was and is still made known to Jew and 
Greek, to full-grown man and little child, to the 
learned and the unlearned, in the same way and on 
the same conditions ? It is not a truth of the Nat- 
ural order; it belongs to the Supernatural realm. 
The key which unlocks the secrets of the Natural 
order is the active intellect of man. The deeper 
mysteries of the Supernatural order are made known 
to that same intellect, submissive to One who 
speaks from an inaccessible and undiscoverable 
sphere. All men have not the intellectual power 
to explore the mystery of the visible world. But all 
men have cars, and all can hear, and all can exercise 
faith ; and therefore is it that the Gospel presents 
the truth to all of us alike, because we have, what- 
ever our rank or powers, only this to do ; to listen, 
to take in, and to believe. 



THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. I $7 

Now this is no tax on any reasonable man, nor is 
any man humiliated in thus accepting the Truth. 
In fact, there is nothing so reasonable, so logical, 
so simple, as this demand on us for submission in 
faith. 

For all truths with which we have to do belong to 
one of two orders, the rational or the superrational ; 
to use more familiar terms, the natural or the super- 
natural. 

Truths of the rational order are within the sphere 
of the reason ; truths of the superrational order are 
above and beyond it — they do not contradict it, they 
merely surpass. 

Truths of the rational order may be first discov- 
ered, and then proved, by the reason alone, in its 
natural use, without supernatural aid. Truths of 
the superrational order can never become known to 
the reason by original investigation, nor can it dem- 
onstrate them, as in the case of things within its 
own sphere, even though by some extraordinary 
means it should arrive at a knowledge of their exist- 
ence. The reason must simply accept them in def- 
erence to some propounding authority external to 
itself. Nor is it disparaging to the reason to state 
that it is thus limited in its range. There is no 
shame in not doing what it is not possible to do ; it 
is no disgrace to a man that he cannot walk on the 
water or fly about in the air ; nor do they cast a slur 
on the human reason, who affirm that it cannot, by 
searching, find out God. 



1 58 THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 

To attain even to a limited knowledge of the 
truths of the superrational order, which is all that 
man can have in his present state, a revelation of 
them is indispensably necessary ; a disclosure, a 
manifestation of them from the side on which they 
come upon us. 

That in man which accepts them is Faith. Now, 
it is a cardinal principle of the Gospel, that " faith 
cometh by hearing ; " 1 not by study, not by investi- 
gation, not by inner revolving ; but simply " by 
hearing;" by listening to the Revealing Agent, 
whatever that agent be, and acquiescing without 
question or demur. This implies a submission. It 
is what the Scriptures call "the obedience of faith. " 2 
I find nothing in this but what is simple and easy 
to take in. The human intelligence learns from a 
higher Intelligence, with which it is naturally in 
correspondence, that there is a certain body of truth, 
of which it knew nothing, and of which, considering 
its limited powers, it could never have known any- 
thing if left to itself. This the higher Intelligence 
discloses ; this the inferior intelligence accepts. 
The act of acceptance we call faith. It is the evi- 
dence, and the only evidence, of things unseen. 3 If 
the faith be real and true, questioning is at an end, 
and so is the process of arguing out toward con- 
clusions ; we perceive that we could never have dis- 
covered the truth for ourselves ; we understand that 

1 Romans x. 17. 
3 Romans i. $ ; xvi. 26. 3 Hebrews xi. I. 



THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 1 59 

it cannot be affected by any disputations of ours 
about it. 

The reason is not limited to a mere assent to what 
is thus disclosed. In that case it would be but a 
registering machine ; its dignity, its rights, and its 
duty would be annulled. The legitimate work of 
the reason is two-fold : First, to verify the authority 
which demands its submission, and, secondly, having 
accepted the truth as revealed, to study it, to search 
out proofs from analogy, from congruence, from the 
facts of human nature ; to harmonize these axioms of 
knowledge with whatever man can discover by him- 
self ; and to apply them to moral, social, and politi- 
cal problems. The reason illuminated by faith is 
equipped for a magnificent work, in confirmation, 
illustration, and application of principles which never 
change, and in which there is no variableness or 
shadow of turning. 1 

And hence we see the superiority of the work 
done by the reason when loyal to Revelation and 
advancing on her royal path without the disadvan- 
tage of a false start, and the outcome of the efforts 
of that same reason when handicapped by the idea 
that it ought to try to do what it was not made to 
do, and that nothing is so laudable and seemly as to 
expend one's energies in making ineffectual clutches 
at what hangs beyond the reach. 

But having made such claims for faith, I must 
proceed to point to a fatal error, that of applying 
1 James i. 17. 



l6o THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FALTH. 

the sacred name to what are merely ratiocinations of 
mind. It is necessary to our argument that this 
should be done, because of the state of bewilderment 
in which we find many persons who profess and call 
themselves Christians, and really think that they 
believe. In fact, they do not believe, in the strict 
sense of the term. The acceptance of the Gospel 
on authority has not yet occurred, where the au- 
thority is that of the man's own conclusions, for in 
that case what he submits to is actually his own 
self. You say, " I believe." I ask, in what do you 
believe ? Do you mean that you have arrived at, 
and are resting in, some conclusion which you accept 
because it seems to you reasonable and just ? It 
may not seem so to another man ; and you should 
not call that attitude of yours by the name of Cath- 
olic or Dogmatic Faith. If the object on which you 
are fixing your faith is an evolution of your own 
thought, or the result of the application of your own 
powers to religious problems, what are you leaning 
on but yourself ? How do you differ from the 
heathen in the islands of the sea ? He takes a bit 
of wood or stone and carves it into an image, and 
that is his god. You take better implements, a 
sharp wit and an incisive critical faculty, a volume 
or two of German philosophy, a handbook or two 
of physical science, and, possessed by preconceived 
notions, and in the prejudices of your blood and 
your time, you make your god. What is the differ- 
ence ? I cannot discern any ; nor can I see why you 



THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. l6l 

should call yourself a man of faith. Perhaps the 
work of the poor savage, who, at all events, is hum- 
ble, may less offend the powers above us than that 
which is done in the studios of our dilettante theo- 
logues, where they scale down the Holy Scriptures, 
and turn out their fine artistic work in revision 
and correction of the Creed of the Holy Catholic 
Church. 

Nor yet can a man in this way get a firm grip on 
the other world. His faith and his thought appear 
to be much the same. But the thought of to-day 
is not, certainly, the thought of the morrow. There 
is no guarantee that a faith which is the work of 
man, and comes by study, comparison, and conclu- 
sion, will be next year what it is now ; he is over 
sanguine who expects such a thing. Men count on 
intellectual growth, as individuals and as a race : 
they learn, they take in new ideas. If the belief of 
to-day be the outcome of to-day's intellectual state, 
where shall be that faith, when the said intellectual 
state shall have been modified, changed, revolution- 
ized ? There is no warrant of permanence to such 
a faith. It cannot give assurance ; it does not test 
obedience; it involves neither sacrifice nor submis- 
sion. True faith implies submission to authority, 
and confers assurance as the reward. Now, then, 
that faith only is true which puts a man under sub- 
jection to Another, not himself ; and none but that 
can give certitude and peace. And, therefore, what 
the rationalist understands by faith is not faith at 



1 62 THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 

all, but something of the man himself; it is en- 
gendered in his inward parts ; it exacts no submis- 
sion ; it guarantees no permanence in his religious 
history ; he shrinks from the idea of expressing it 
in exact terms. And we see this every day ; for the 
liberal Christian, while always boasting of his free- 
dom, is evidently blown about by every wind, and 
tossed on waves of doubt. No one can tell how 
much he believes, or what ; and he cannot tell him- 
self, because he does not know. 

And now we have reached the final question. 
Since no faith is true where there is not submission 
to an authority outside of him that believeth, what 
is that Authority which proposes to us men the 
object on which our faith must rest ? It is, it can 
only be, Almighty God Himself, that God " in 
Whom we live and move and have our being, Who 
is not far from everyone of us ; " ' the Eternal, the 
Invisible, the One past searching out ; the One 
Whose Name is mystery, "I AM THAT I AM." 2 
He it is that speaks ; He is the Revealer ; He, be- 
tween whom, as the Infinite, and creation as finite, 
there is essential distinction. I said that the reason 
has the right to verify the authority which demands 
its submission. I do not deny that when the Voice 
speaks, and " the faith which cometh by hearing" 
is demanded, we have a right to challenge the 
speaker, and ask who it is ? Nor do we risk aught 

1 Acts xvii. 27, 28. 

2 Exodus iii. 14. " Ego Sum Qui Sum" (Vulgate). 



THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 1 63 

in that admission. What God tells us is what man 
everlastingly desires to hear; what God offers is 
what man longs to possess. The Gospel — for that 
is the lovely name of the revelation of superrational 
and supernatural truth — came to no class in partic- 
ular, but to every human being, and common-sense 
may be trusted with the question whether to hear 
or to refuse. For in this our life there are preambles 
to faith, dispositions toward faith, preparations for 
faith, which make it natural to believe, and un- 
natural to doubt, and unwise to lose time in quib- 
bling and disputing, when, nature is crying out for 
God. 

First, certain truths have been disclosed to all ; 
and these set the reason to work, and make it a 
live reason and not a dead one. Such are the ex- 
istence of God, His Eternal power, and the Moral 
Law. No one is left to gather that much of knowl- 
edge for himself ; it is the common property of the 
race. Secondly, there are ineradicable convictions 
on the subject of our moral disorder, and a future 
retribution. Yea, moreover, spirit feeleth after 
spirit, and man is restless till he rest in his Creator. 
Our intuitions, our consciousness of sin, our sense of 
want, our solemn apprehension of a corning day of 
reckoning, draw men toward the point at which 
they must believe, because they cannot mistake the 
Voice which speaks. Men are naturally so consti- 
tuted as to feel the need of a message from the 
other world ; they are prepared for it in advance. 



164 THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 

God once showed His face to man, in the long ago, 
when He created him in His own image ; man has 
not forgotten, and cannot forget. And when God 
looks on us again, through the cloud which we have 
raised by our sin, we believe, because we can no 
more help it than we can help breathing. And we 
believe, not because of any poor work we have been 
doing, with our own rule and square, our plummet, 
diagrams, and school-boy demonstrations ; but be- 
cause it is the instinct of every healthful mind and 
heart to drink of the sources of immortal life. 
" Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after 
righteousness, for they shall be filled." ' The in- 
stincts of humanity make ready the way of faith. 
" Faith cometh by hearing : and hearing by the 
Word of God." 2 

Yes — and as we say this, let us bend the head 
and bow the knee— by the WORD OF GOD. 
For " the Word was made Flesh, and dwelt among 
us." 3 " God hath spoken to us, in these last days, 
by His Son." 4 In visible form came that Son of 
God, speaking with a human voice, which voice was 
heard, in the ordinary way, by human ears. The 
faith, which gives " boldness " and " assurance," 
came first by hearing that Divine Word of God In- 
carnate. While the sceptics were exhibiting their 
poverty and nakedness, and the rationalists were 
running uncertainly and chasing the phantoms of 

1 S. Matt. v. 6. 2 Rom. x. 17. 

3 S. John i. 14. 4 Hebrews i. 2. 



THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 1 65 

their own creation, the poor, the meek, the sinners, 
and all who love truth in an honest and simple way, 
were hearing the Voice which rang forth clearly 
amid the discords of the world. It is of fact that the 
Speaker drew all men to Him, through the sense of 
their need and of his power. This was God show- 
ing Himself to men, when men most deeply felt 
that they could not live without the sight and 
knowledge of God ; a sight and a knowledge to 
which philosophy had failed to attain. Historically, 
the result was what we know. The religion grew, 
it spread from nation to nation, it conquered with 
sign of more than earthly power ; with lofty in- 
difference to the wisdom, the spirit, the promise 
of the world. There is not, in it, a trace of the 
speculative, critical, or philosophical methods. Its 
founder said, " I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of 
heaven and earth, that Thou hast hid these things 
from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them 
unto babes." ' To everyone who listened, and ac- 
cepted the doctrine, He said in substance, " Blessed 
art thou, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto 
thee, but My Father which is in heaven." 2 Flesh 
and Blood is man : and everlastingly is this true, 
that the knowledge of the Supernatural Order, 
and of our relation to it, cometh not by " flesh and 
blood," but is revealed to the flesh and blood by 
the powers above us. And men believed, because 
they must ; because what they heard came right 
1 S. Matt. xi. 25. 2 S. Matt. xvi. 17. 



1 66 THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 

home ; and in that faith in Jesus Christ they found 
assured knowledge and the peace which the world 
could not give. 

It is a long time from that day to this ; and yet 
the conditions to finding rest, assurance, and peace 
are exactly what they were. It is as true to- 
day as ever it was, that faith cometh by hearing ; 
that what is heard is a voice ; that the voice is that 
of the Word of God. One difference there is, and 
but one. The voice then spoke directly ; now it 
speaks through an agency organized to tell forth its 
utterances from one generation to another. While 
Christ dwelt here on earth, visibly, faith came by 
hearing His own, His very voice. After He retired 
from view, faith came by hearing the "witnesses of 
His resurrection." ' Those witnesses can never die ; 
they live in their successors, as He promised, saying, 
" Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
world." 2 Faith in Jesus Christ, since He went 
away into heaven, has always rested on testimony ; 
and the testimony to Jesus Christ is that which has 
been borne, these two thousand years almost, by 
the historic body which we know as the One Holy 
Catholic and Apostolic Church. God was revealed 
in Christ ; Christ is preached to us in His Church ; 
God, Christ, and the Visible Church which is His 
Body : there is the authority which demands the 
submission of man. And Catholic Faith is that 
which first accepts the witness of the Living Body 
1 Acts i. 22. a S. Matt, xxviii. 20. 



THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 1 67 

to the Living Head and then accepts the witness of 
that Living Head, whose name is the Word of God, 
to the mysteries of that Order which is beyond our 
sight, and beyond our reach, toward which we press 
forward as to our eternal home. 

I feel as if I ought to ask pardon for detaining 
you so long, or for trying to compress so much into 
so small a space. But perhaps in after years it may 
help some to recall the things that have now been 
said. Let me sum them up briefly. 

Doubt and uncertainty are not characteristics of 
the Christian religion. When found among its pro- 
fessors they denote imperfection. Christianity 
means, lucid statement, exact definition, confidence 
in teaching, boldness against error, assurance of soul. 
It was so at first ; it will be so always, unless the 
spiritual life is impaired. When Christianity ceases 
to be dogmatic, and leaves her children doubtful of 
the truth, it is as with Samson when his locks were 
shorn, when they cried, derisively, " The Philistines 
be upon thee," and he was helpless amid his foes. 

But assurance comes by faith. And faith is then 
only real when it rests on an object outside the 
man. 

The objects on which true faith is fixed belong to 
an Order inaccessible to the natural powers, and in- 
telligible only through revelation. 

The Agent in that revelation is the Incarnate 
Word of God. True faith is faith in Him ; it in- 
cludes instant assent to whatever He says, and com- 



l68 THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 

pliance with whatever He commands. He is ever 
present with us, as Teacher and Master. He speaks 
to us, in His Church. That Church is not a school 
of philosophy, but a witness to facts and a guardian 
of a body of doctrine revealed long ago. She has 
to repeat, without variation, the message entrusted 
to her care, and to call men everywhere to their 
Saviour and their God. 

He who will hear, believe, and obey, shall so 
come to rest and peace. He shall be " stablished, 
strengthened, settled," ' firmly and joyfully, like 
those of old time, who said, in life, " I know whom 
I have believed," 2 and as death drew near, ex- 
claimed triumphantly, " I have fought the good 
fight, I have kept the faith ; henceforth there is 
laid up for me a crown of righteousness." 3 This is 
their reward, "the confidence of a certain faith, the 
comfort of a reasonable religious and holy hope." 4 
And these are the spiritual glories, the vital forces, 
and the supreme consolations which some forego, 
because too proud to take on them the yoke of the 
Gospel, and bend the knee before the oracles which 
proclaim the way of everlasting life. 

I have two suggestions to make before I conclude. 
One relates to a phenomenon of the day ; the other 
to a sophism of our adversaries. 

First, do not be alarmed, or even surprised, at the 
world's unbelief. You know, perhaps, how many 

1 i Peter v. 10. * 2 Tim. i. 12. 

3 2 Tim. iv. S : S. 4 Office of the Visitation of" the Sick. 



THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITLI. 169 

are alienated from God and the Church. Fret not 
yourselves because of this. Such men were here, in 
the Saviour's day ; they disputed with Him, re- 
sisted Him, and even, at last, put Him to death. 
Such men are in the world now. Argument is use- 
less where there is no common ground from which 
to start. No man can receive the sayings of the 
Lord unless he is inwardly prepared for their recep- 
tion, as the good soil for the seed to be sown ; and 
there are conditions, intellectual and moral, which 
put men, for the time, beyond the reach of the help- 
ing hand. Remember, that the faith w r hich over- 
cometh the world, is itself a divine gift : " by grace ye 
are saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves ; 
it is the gift of God." 1 If that be so, it is not the 
business of man to try and evolve from within him- 
self, by his own efforts, the spiritual power ; but it 
is his business to see that he do nothing, say noth- 
ing, think nothing which may tend to shut out the 
light, or to unfit him for the visitation and the gift of 
God. Nothing blinds men so effectually as reliance 
on their own opinions ; mistaking darkness for light, 
is the sin of this day ; it was the sin of the ancient 
enemies of the Lord. " If ye were blind," said He 
to them, " ye should have no sin : but now ye say, 
We see, therefore your sin remaineth." 2 

And next let me refer to an objection by which 
men seek to overturn our position. " You accuse 
us," they say, " of rationalizing. You do the same. 
1 Ephes. ii. 8. 2 S. John ix. 41. 



I70 THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 

For you concede that the reason must judge of the 
authority, and verify the credentials presented. Now 
if this be so, the final submission rests on a conclu- 
sion of the reason, regarding the authority to which 
it yields, and your process also is but rationalism after 
all." The objection is a plausible one, but sophisti- 
cal. Undoubtedly, when challenged by a Power 
demanding surrender, a man has a right to ask, 
" Who art thou, that I should yield ? " And the 
Lord shrunk not from such a test of His claim, for 
He said, " Search the Scriptures, for they testify of 
Me." But there is a great difference between a tem- 
per which resolves from the outset to admit no mas- 
ter, but to go on by itself, carrying out its own 
theories to the logical end, and the spirit which, con- 
fessing its need of help, is only waiting to find the 
authority which has the right to command. The 
difference between men in these two states is one not 
merely of degree, but of essential quality. Each 
reasons, but on lines of perpetual divergence. It is 
true that, in a certain sense, the man of faith does 
rationalize; but his thought and intention are dia- 
metrically opposite to those of the sceptic and the 
philosopher; for he uses his reason to disclose and 
identify that Being who shall teach him a truth 
which he knows he cannot teach himself. Let me 
illustrate the difference and so make reply to the 
objection raised. Two men, travelling in unknown 
places, come to a point at which half a dozen roads 
meet. Which path shall they take ? There stands, 



THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 171 

in the midst of this confusion, a guide-post. One of 
our travellers says : " What need of a guide-post ? 
They are relics of superstition. My intelligence is 
guide sufficient : I shall reason this thing out for my- 
self, and trust to my private judgment alone to dis- 
cover which is the right road." The other says : " I 
know not where I am : unaided I cannot find out. 
But yonder is a guide-post. I conclude that it was 
put there to help people in my plight ; and my 
reason tells me that it will be wise to take the path 
which it indicates. I do so, without further ques- 
tion, and I shall walk straight on without fear, rely- 
ing on that which I have read." Both these men 
reason ; the one in presumption, the other in humil- 
ity ; the one as wise, the other as a fool. The pro- 
cess is one ; but the spirit is essentially different. 
And this is the difference between the reason rightly 
used and the reason abused. In the one case the 
spring of action is independence, in the other it is 
diffidence. One man is locked up within himself, in 
a supreme conceit of his own sufficiency : the other 
is lifted out of himself, to see " the King in His 
beauty, and the land which is very far off." ' 

My dear young brethren, one parting word to you. 
" Exhort young men to be sober-minded," saith the 
Apostle. 2 If you hope to escape the " corruption 
which is in the world through lust," 3 you must keep 
the heart pure and the head steady. It pertains to 

1 Isaiah xxxiii. 17. 
2 Titus ii. 6. 3 2 Peter i. 4. 



172 THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 

sobriety of mind to admit frankly that there are 
laws of God which limit thought as well as laws 
which limit act. Take this from your preacher, as 
a statement which your own observation will confirm 
hereafter, that the maximum of doubt is the mini- 
mum of religion, and that the minimum of religion is 
the maximum of immorality. Take this from him 
as an axiom, that there are things which the human 
reason cannot do. It cannot discover, by itself, 
what is behind the Veil ; and yet, on your full and 
assured knowledge of what is behind it depends 
your knowledge of yourself, of your place in God's 
universe, of the highest good attainable in life, of 
the port to which you are bound across the sea of 
time. There is that above, around, beneath, within, 
which you can neither prove nor disprove ; but you 
can know it by faith ; and that faith is the condition 
to knowledge of self, of duty, and of destiny. But 
why do I offer you these suggestions ? Such thoughts 
as these cannot be new to you ; they must have been 
awakened already, by the words of your wise and re- 
ligious teachers in this Christian University. What 
augury of good in the name ! A Christian Univer- 
sity ! A University of the Church ! A nursing 
mother of pure, high-toned, and thoughtful sons! A 
school where the doors of Science, Art, Philosophy, 
and Letters are thrown wide open to eager youth ; 
where they may learn the wonder and the glory of 
the Visible ; where they also learn to reverence the 
Invisible, Before us a Veil is drawn which closes 



THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 1 73 

up the mortal and finite scene ; from it are heard 
voices of another sphere, to which this life draws for- 
ward as the river to the open sea. In studies hal- 
lowed by Religion, the mind is led from point to 
point, till it becomes that magnificent power which 
an unabused intellect must be ; having scanned the 
lordly works, it discerns as its highest duty that of 
worshipping their Divine Creator. The knowledge 
of the arts, science, and philosophy, wrongly at- 
tained, disposes to doubt and may lead down to ut- 
ter darkness. But work done as it must be done in 
a Christian University, hath promise of this world 
and of that which is to come. Such work is good 
and profitable to men ; and they who have been 
trained under such inspirations are, under God, the 
saviors of Society, and the true benefactors of our 
race. Nor shall the world, at any stage of its prog- 
ress, fail to hear that confession which has been ut- 
tered by the profoundest thinkers, the most accom- 
plished scholars, and the holiest souls of ages past, 
and shall be repeated to the end ; that confession 
which marks the sum and terminus of intellectual 
advance : " We have seen the glory and wonder of 
Creation ; we have deeply studied Nature, we have 
mastered hard problems ; we have made discoveries 
all along the road ; yet we see, at last, greater things 
than these. Behold, we see the heavens opened, 
and the Son of Man standing on the Right Hand of 
God." 



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